National Road, American Treasure

Carol and I just got back from a fascinating drive along an interstate highway, parts of which are barely wider than a pickup truck!

It’s a highway, all right, just not a new one. And it was an interstate – in fact, the very first federal highway, begun in 1811, about 140 years before land was cleared for what we now know as America’s Interstate Highway System.

George Washington, the nation’s first president and a surveyor by trade, had fought French and Indian forces in western Pennsylvania, where the woods are as thick as bulrushes. Firsthand, he saw the difficulty of moving armies into the frontier, and he pressed for better roads than the old animal and Indian trails along which travelers struggled to move at the time.

Travel on America’s early roads was, as the innkeeper Thenardier said in "Les Misérables," “a curse”

Several short, earthen toll roads, or turnpikes, which were mired in mud each winter and spring and choked with dust much of the rest of the year, were cut between the port city of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay and Cumberland, Maryland, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But far beyond those dense mountains beckoned the new “Northwest Territory” that began in Ohio. So in 1806, Congress authorized construction of what it foresaw as a sort of portage road between the Potomac River near Cumberland in the east, and the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), far to the west.

Westward, Ho!

George Washington commanded, if not slept, here, and this cabin in Cumberland is ground zero of The National Road.

Beginning in a triangular park in downtown Cumberland at a little log cabin that had once been Washington’s headquarters, workers blazed westward along the old Nemacolin or Braddock Trail. Nemacolin was a Delaware Indian chief; Edward Braddock, a British general who had tramped that way, hoping to capture French forts.

But the “National Road,” as everyone soon called this remarkable pathway west, kept right on going, past Wheeling onto Zane’s Trace, a barely improved wilderness footpath to Zanesville in eastern Ohio. The target terminus, far to the west, was the mightiest river of all: the distant Mississippi. The National Road almost made it, stretching about 1,000 kilometers to Vandalia in central Illinois in the 1840s before funding ran out and enthusiasm waned. That’s because speedy, capacious new railroads stole the road’s thunder as well as most of its people and freight.

Here’s Doug, ready with a story about rudimentary early travel on The National Road

Carol and I learned a lot of this from Doug Smith, our enthusiastic guide and traveling companion on an exploration of remnants of The National Road in Ohio. Unlike the many train freaks and vintage-car enthusiasts, Doug, who’s a real-estate broker, Licking County commissioner, and auctioneer – you should hear him speed-talk through an auctioneer’s call! – just loves old roads. Until he and Glenn Harper, a founding member of the Ohio National Road Association, came along, most of the romantic stories of America’s historic byways had been lavished upon U.S. Route 66, which was created in the “roaring” 1920s from a string of state roads out west. Connecting Chicago to the Pacific Ocean via quirky crossroads and scenic desert byways, 66 has come to be known as “the Mother Road.”

If that’s so, The National Road, begun 110 years earlier, is wiry old Great Grandma.

The National Road doesn’t yet have as many trinkets, slogans, or fan clubs as U.S. 66 out West. But folks in Ohio are working on it

“John Steinbeck and [the Great Depression novel] The Grapes of Wrath didn’t hurt the nostalgic craze over Route 66,” Doug Smith reminded me. Doug and Glenn Harper aren’t (yet) in Steinbeck’s league, but they have produced an exceptional little travelers’ guide that is a treasure trove of stories, vintage photos, and maps that help visitors locate, then enjoy, the many, though often hidden, delights to be found on The National Road in Ohio.

Doug and Glenn’s travel guide spans many generations of "The Road That Helped Build America"

Carol and I wore out our copies, even as Doug told us stories and pointed out spots that we’d have never found on our own. And we ended up in one of the most curious, intellectually nutritious museums in America. Curious, as you’ll see, because of the odd combination of themes presented there.

All Aboard for Time Travel

I hope you like history as much as I do – and the wind in your hair as you drive with the top down! We’re gassed up and ready for a trip down The National Road. A smidgen of it, at least.

As I mentioned, The National Road winds from the ancient mountains of western Maryland to the pancake-flat plains of Illinois. Doug Smith’s neck of the woods in eastern Ohio is just a microcosm of an old road that teems with stories dating as far back as the opening of the American frontier.

Signs old and new adjoin each other along the venerable road in eastern Ohio

Much of the way as you whiz past red, white, and blue signs for The National Road, you’re driving U.S. 40, a two- or sometimes four-lane federal highway that was given its number during the same era that Route 66 was strung together out West.

But those colorful signs reflect fiction as well as truth. U.S. 40 does follow the general path of the old National Road, but many of the most compelling remnants of the original, historic highway are little more than offshoots – driveway-size, even – running off that road into the woods or right up to somebody’s farm. If you didn’t have Doug Smith in the car with you, you wouldn’t know the real National Road was there. The original, narrow road twisted and

This is a piece of the original National Road, as first paved with concrete about 1916. Driving along U.S. 40, you’d never see it

turned, loped straight up gentle hills, and curled around steep ones. Come U.S. 40, the highway engineers of the 1920s were determined to proceed as straight as possible from Cumberland west, and they proceeded to widen, cut, fill, and pave over the old road to do it – chewing up, disguising, and discarding much of The National Road as they went.

Allow me to present nuggets from Doug and Glenn’s travelers’ guide, Doug’s genial tour, and my own peeks at roadside markers and overlooks.

Connections

The Wheeling Suspension Bridge, over which The National Road still runs, looks its age, for sure

Doug likes to tell about the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, across which The National Road finally spanned the Ohio River in 1849. Originally the world’s longest suspension bridge (at 308 meters), it twisted and torqued and finally collapsed into the river one day five years later, during a frightful storm. Everything but the structural engineer’s reputation survived. When it came time to rebuild, John Roebling, renowned for his Brooklyn Bridge across the East River in New York City, got the job. But the new Wheeling bridge got built only after city burghers upriver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stopped bellowing. They were worried that the workhorse steamboats of the period would not be able to pass under Roebling’s creation and deliver goods to Pittsburgh. Clever inventors averted the problem by figuring a way to tilt steamboat stacks backward on hinges, even at full steam, low enough to glide safely under Roebling’s bridge.

The National Road had first reached Ohio via smaller bridges, igniting a human flood so profound that, by the 1840 census, “frontier” Ohio had become the nation’s third-most-populous state.

Going in Cycles

Safety bikes were all the rage, even among the nation’s “new women,” in 1895, when this poster was produced

And The National Road became its most popular thoroughfare. In their guide, Glenn Harper and Doug Smith include this note about the “safety bicycle” – the low-riding kind with wheels of equal size that we know today – that replaced scary, bone-shaking (and occasionally -breaking), 1.5-meter-high models that had been in vogue. The safety bike, the authors report, “brought new life to the old Road. To prove their physical prowess, young men would sometimes ride one hundred miles or more. Sherman Granger established a record in 1897 by riding his bicycle from Zanesville to Cumberland [337 kilometers] in four and one-half days. Such enthusiasts organized the League of American Wheelmen and in their quest for appropriate places to ride helped champion the ‘Good Roads Movement.’ Advocates for the movement increased dramatically with the invention and increased use of the automobile. In just ten years from 1900 to 1910, the number of automobiles increased from 8,000 to 468,000.”

That’s more than 58 times as many “horseless carriages” in a decade. And an awful lot of them rolled along The National Road.

Site Manager Mary Ellen Weingartner near the end of the National Road/Zane Grey Museum’s meticulously accurate diorama

I mentioned a most unusual museum. Called The National Road/Zane Grey Museum, it’s tucked up on a hill in little Norwich, Ohio. That’s enunciated as “Nor-wick,” not “witch,” in these parts, for reasons known only to denizens of the town. The museum, supported by the state historical society, displays three almost completely unrelated sorts of artifacts. One set, pertinent to our visit, explains The National Road. It includes a superb 41-meter-long diorama, displaying hundreds of tiny, hand-carved natural features, human figures, animals, wagons, tools, and road-building equipment – each individually crafted – plus other treasures and photographs related to the first federal road. The Zane Grey portion tells the story of America’s best-known Old West adventure novelist; he grew up nearby and was a great-grandson of Ebenezer Zane, whose “trace” we mentioned earlier. And there’s a wing devoted strictly to art pottery, which was once a thriving business in eastern Ohio.

Site manager Mary Ellen Weingartner pointed out three artifacts, in particular, that caught my fancy:

One was a “Gunter’s chain,” named after a 17th-Century British mathematician. Its 100 links, precisely, stretch exactly 66 feet (just over 20 meters). The men who blazed The National Road used Gunter’s chains to hew a uniform right-of-way as they went. The traveling portion was usually far narrower, as shallow drainage ditches and space for markers ate up part of the width.

The second notable artifact was an actual Conestoga wagon, which Mary Ellen described as the “semi truck of its day.” This was the pioneer freight wagon that you see in film “westerns” – the sort with billowing white canvas affixed to its high, arching

That’s an ordinary shoe, all right, between the pieces of wood in the braking device of an old Conestoga wagon

ribs. Conestoga wagons, named after the Pennsylvania valley in which they first appeared, carried no drivers or passengers. They were pulled by 6 to 12 horses or oxen, but the drovers rode or walked alongside. The only seat was a short, hard, retractable “lazy board,” sticking out from the wagon’s side, on which an exhausted person could catch what must have been a short, incredibly uncomfortable ride. When these heavily laden “prairie schooners” headed downhill, a lever engaged a brake shoe to prevent the wagon from rolling over the dray animals that were pulling it.

I note this because a Conestoga wagon’s brake shoes were, in fact, real shoes! No doubt hand-me-downs that already had holes in their soles.

Look Out Below

Downhill travel on The National Road was indeed an adventure. Approaching a steep decline, a drover would sometimes stop, cut down a large tree, and tie it to the back of his wagon to slow the heavy, rolling loads. There’s even a slightly macabre marker along the Ohio portion of the road that pinpoints the spot where Christopher Baldwin became Ohio’s first known traffic fatality. On August 20, 1835, Baldwin, a Massachusetts antiquarian en route to central Ohio to study prehistoric Indian mounds, was riding “up top” with his stagecoach driver when they passed a pack of grunting hogs. The horses reared, the coach tipped over, and poor Baldwin broke his neck.

In 1912, Congress ordered several “Madonna of the Trail” statues, including this one on the National Road in Ohio, erected along historic roads to salute westward-bound pioneers

That third item of note at the National Museum/Zane Grey Museum is a series of rings that Mary Ellen Weingarten uses for school-group demonstrations. The rings fit around stones of various sizes, gathered in the area during an early upgrade of The National Road. It employed a mélange called “macadam,” developed in Scotland by John McAdam about 1820. A frame was laid ahead across the terrain, into which layers of carefully sorted stones, large ones underneath up to pebbles at road level, were spread, then compacted by a heavy, horse-drawn roller. No adhesives or fillers held these millions of stones together, Mary Ellen told me. The road was no longer a muddy path. It was all rocks, smooshed by that roller, then further compressed by passing wagon wheels and the feet of travelers and livestock.

That’ll Be 27 Cents

This was one of the first toll booths travelers would have encountered on The National Road, near La Vale, west of Cumberland

Both Mary Ellen and Doug pointed out The National Road became a toll turnpike once the federal government turned over jurisdiction to the states in 1835. Tollhouses popped up along the “turnpike.” (The word derives from the days when real pikes, or sharpened rods, across the road kept non-paying travelers from passing.) Travelers “coming down the pike” with those Conestoga wagons paid no toll at all, because the freight wagons’ wide wheels helped tamp down the road. Sheepherders were assessed 3 cents a score (20 head) for their herd; cattle – though nice and heavy – had sharp hooves that tore up the road, so their toll was 7 cents a score. Drovers took respite, and enjoyed a drink or two or ten, in roadside inns or in “pike towns” that sprang up along the road. Animal pens and barns corralled their animals.

Here’s a short stretch of the Old National Road that had been paved in brick. Note how narrow it was!

In the 19-teens, engineers introduced still more new paving materials to The National Road. In places where brickyards abounded, row after row (after row after row after row!) of brick were laid. In fact, prison convicts completed an 80-kilometer stretch of brick from Zanesville eastward to Wheeling. Elsewhere, crews tried out various early forms of concrete. On some of those original road offshoots that you find off in the brush next to U.S. 40, you can walk on

You can see the narrow-gauge railroad engine at work alongside highway workers as The National Road was repaved in the 19-teens

95-year-old concrete and break off a stone or two where the surface has crumbled. To lay all that concrete, Doug Smith explained, narrow-gauge railways were created just for that job. They hauled sand and gravel and stones alongside the pavers, and as work moved on down the road, the rails were pulled.

Rest Only if You Must

Doug noted that there were rest areas along The National Road, just as you’ll find on today’s Interstate Highway System. There were certainly no information kiosks or giveaway maps, vending machines or men’s and ladies’ rooms, however. These turnouts offered only shade, a water well and pump, maybe a hard bench or two, and pit toilets.

This is part of the inscribed rock at “The Eagle’s Nest” along the National Road

Sometimes various layers of history converge along The National Road. Near the little town of Brownsville, for instance, a granite boulder at a place called the “Eagle’s Nest” was engraved in 1914 with the outline of a covered wagon and an early roadster automobile, as well as a written notation about the repaving of the highway. But attention is also drawn to the valley below, where the world’s first demonstration of contour farming was taking place at the same time.

And this is a look at another old marker on site

Congress stipulated that markers be placed once in every mile along the road. Crews used their Gunter’s chain for that task as well; stretch one out exactly 80 times, and you had a mile. The sandstone mile markers, buried deep in the ground, carry a surprising amount of information, starting with the distance to Cumberland and including the names of, and distances to, the nearest towns. When these markers were broken by wayward vehicles or malicious vandals, concrete ones replaced them.

Here’s what’s left of one of those old strip motels that sprouted along The National Road in the 1940s

Other less formal sentinels of the old road are harder to find. Most period gas stations have been razed, turned into junk shops and the like, or modernized. Most, but not all, of the dreary little tourist courts, such as the “Nighty-Night Motel,” with their rows of identical rooms facing right onto the highway, are gone or empty relics. The clever Burma Shave shaving-cream ads that unfolded in four-line couplets plus a tag line on crude wooden signs . . .

Don’t stick your arm
Out too far
It might go home
In another car
Burma Shave

An old, but photogenic, rustic barn along The National Road

. . . are nowhere to be seen. But Carol was thrilled when Doug led us to a couple of classic, extant “Mail Pouch” barns, on which the chewing tobacco company’s distinctive logo had been carefully hand-painted.. In fact, Doug and Glenn Harper note in their travelers’ guide, a fellow named Harley Warrick from nearby Belmont, Ohio, painted hundreds of those signs on barns throughout the Midwest for half a century.

S as in Bridge

Here’s an early postcard view of an S-bridge in eastern Ohio

It’s hard to drag a “favorite favorite” National Road site out of Doug Smith. He loves every sign and pebble. But he’s awfully partial to the “S-bridges” that you can still see in a few places off U.S. 40. The bridge structures themselves are not S-shaped; that would be engineering folly. Like every bridge I’ve ever seen, save for one that I’ll tell you about in a moment, they shoot straight across the water at a neat 90-degree angle to the shorelines. But remember all those twists and turns of the original roadway? They brought The National Road up to many rivers at odd angles. So the early engineers had to maneuver the connections

And here’s the approach to one of the S-bridges as it looks today

from the road to the bridge this way or that in order to line them up for a perfectly straight shot across. Taken together, the wiggly approaches and the ruler-straight bridge have the look of a big, snaky S. (You can see what I mean in the adjacent photos.)

My favorite stop was a pretty park, high above Zanesville. Below sat not just the town, in postcard splendor, but particularly a bridge over the intersecting Licking and Muskingum rivers.

Zanesville’s world-famous Y-bridge

That’s right: one bridge over the confluence of two rivers! It’s Y-shaped, the only one in the world, by Doug’s reckoning. For sure, it’s the only place we know of where you can go to the middle of a bridge and turn right! Early versions of Zanesville’s Y-bridge were even covered, like the quaint, though conventionally straight, covered bridges you see in Vermont or Indiana.

Here's the Ohio capitol, past which U.S. 40, successor to the National Road, still runs. No, they didn't run out of money to finish the dome. The roof is flat, but there's a rounded dome inside it!

The National Road runs through two state capitals: Columbus, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana, though you have to work to find it in both of those cities. Carol and I were both places on this trip but didn’t try very hard.

One of the treats of our ride along the old National Road occurred at a few spots where it was possible to stand on a fragment of the original pike, look across a field or up a hillside, and see two more generations of the road: U.S. 40 and today’s ultramodern, ultrafast Interstate 70. Not surprisingly, I-70 was the only busy one of the bunch.

I was standing on part of the old National Road when I took this shot of U.S. 40 in the distance. My eye could also see I-70 farther away, but it doesn’t show up very well here

In 2002, The National Road added a name when Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta designated it as “The National Historic Road.” That was rather a waste of effort. The “historic” part, as I hope Doug and I have demonstrated, goes without saying.

[Glenn Harper and Doug Smith’s The Historic National Road in Ohio: The Road That Helped Build America was published in 2005 by the Ohio Historical Society.]

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Capacious. Large in capacity.

Denizen. Strictly, this means any inhabitant of a place. But the word also gives special status to animals and those of mystical powers, as in “denizens of the deep” or “denizens of the fields.”

Smidgen. A little bit. Sometimes shortened to “smidge.”

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Sad Times in Slavic Village

If you’ve been with me from the start of Ted Landphair’s America, you’ll remember that I began with some memories of a pleasant childhood in the first suburb to the west of bustling Cleveland, Ohio. When I was a lad of 8 in 1950, the big city next door was at its apogee – pushing a million in population and humming with smoky industry.

Since then, Cleveland has lost most of its industrial muscle and half its population. More than 100,000 people have died or left since 2002 alone. Only New Orleans, Louisiana, which was slammed by an epic, deadly hurricane, has shed more population since 2000.

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster. Cleveland’s disaster, just as tragic though more elongated, is manmade.

You may know the term “perfect storm.” It’s taken from a 1997 book by Sebastian Junger, later made into a movie starring George Clooney, about the fluke convergence of three storm systems in the North Atlantic that doomed a Massachusetts fishing trawler and its crew.

Cleveland has been slammed by a devastating convergence of economic and demographic storms.

Cleveland rocks! At least at this popular museum

As I said, Cleveland was rocking in 1950. That’s not a reference to what is now the city’s most famous tourist attraction, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which arrived several decades later.

But in the 1980s, Cleveland’s steel industry virtually collapsed, a victim of widespread inefficiency in its aging mills and aggressive price competition from foreign steelmakers. With it went hundreds of smaller factories that fed the mills, and thousands and thousands of jobs. Giant ore-carriers that once tied at the city docks on Lake Erie rarely called. As poor African Americans moved into neighborhoods abandoned by “ethnics,” as they were called, who had worked the mills, “white flight” to the suburbs became a stampede. That left Cleveland a largely poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, industrially fallow shell of its former self. Like its cavernous, creaky, pigeon-filled downtown stadium that people called “The Mistake by the Lake,” Cleveland became a synonym for crumbling Rust Belt. “You’re from Cleveland? outsiders would say when they met people from the region, as if they were miraculous tsunami survivors.

In a way, they were.

The Comeback City

The Terminal Tower was my idea of a skyscraper until I made a high-school trip to New York and, mouth open, stared up at those in Manhattan

Yet a decade later, Cleveland fooled everyone. Mills reopened as specialty operations, making things like aircraft landing gears. “Urban pioneers” of all races took advantage of bargain housing prices and repopulated many depressed neighborhoods. A huge skyscraper, the first to ever compete with the city’s 65-year-old iconic symbol, the 52-story Terminal Tower, in Public Square, rose downtown. Economists marveled, and reporters poured in to get a look. Even Cleveland’s usually inept baseball team, the Indians, got a new, downtown stadium, Jacobs Field – puckishly dubbed the “Jake by the Lake” – and won four division titles in the 1990s, another in 2001, and appeared twice in the grand World Series.

Cleveland made magazine covers as America’s “Comeback City”!

This sign in Slavic Village translates as, “Little Warsaw”

And Slavic Village, a compact neighborhood south of downtown in a sooty industrial valley, was a microcosm of it all, including the manmade disaster to come.

A home that was demolished stood next to this duplex

Textile and steel mills once thrived in the heart of Slavic Village. Polish and Czech immigrants, who had followed a generation of Welsh and Irish blue-collar workers, toiled in the mills, walking from their tiny, crowded cottages to work each day. Many of their homes were duplexes housing two families, or two generations of a single one, in just 90 square meters of space.

This is the doorway to “Saint Stan’s” ─ properly Stanislaus ─ the biggest church in Slavic Village

There was a rejoicing air about Slavic Village from the mingling of accents and strains of polka music, the smells of cabbage and kielbasa sausage, filled dumplings called pierogi, and rich pastries produced by more than 20 bakeries in the neighborhood. Eight large Catholic churches, including St. Stanislaus, the shrine and mother church for Poles throughout the region, filled the pews on Sunday and the streets on numerous festival days. Polish and Czech were spoken in banks, craft shops, restaurants, and other mom-and-pop stores throughout the neighborhood.

Everyday Supermen

This is Tony Brancatelli ─ in front of a genuine Polish bakery in the neighborhood

Anthony Brancatelli – like his Italian father and Polish mother – was reared in Slavic Village. Educated there, too, until he went off to college out of state. But he would return with the wave of third-generation Americans who took a chance on life in a warm but challenging neighborhood where the average annual income – about $27,000 today – barely exceeded the national poverty level.

For a decade, Brancatelli would lead the community development agency that has tried, like the little Dutch boy with his finger in a leaking dike, to stem an economic torrent that I will shortly describe.

There are problems, but still plenty of pride, in Slavic Village. This is the Polish imperial eagle

Four years ago, Brancatelli ran for City Council, representing the ward whose footprint covers Slavic Village, and he won. Since then, he, Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka, and a few other city officials have almost matched the mythic hero Superman’s exploits, battling for “truth, justice, and the American way” against real estate swindlers and predators. Along with further declines in the neighborhood’s industrial base, an increase in crime, the aging of an ethnic population that hasn’t the education or youthful vigor to slide comfortably into the 21st-century Information Age, these unscrupulous “subprime” lenders would prove to be a killer tempest in Cleveland’s perfect storm.

This house has been burned as well as ransacked

Brancatelli doesn’t come across like a hero or an oily politician. Remarkably self-effacing, a mid-level executive by training who’s had to learn the handshake-and-a-beer ethic of ward politics, he never once used the word “I” in our two hours together in the village. Instead, it was ‘we” who faced off against mortgage brokers, foreclosure agents, and scavengers who have turned three or four (or more) of the little houses in nearly every block into boarded-up open invitations to squatting, vandalism, drug dealing, and arson.

What they brought, too, was a prelude to a foreclosure firestorm that would sweep across the nation.

Scamming, Selling, Scavenging

Freelance mortgage brokers for banks, which could deny culpability since they didn’t directly employ these people, swooped into Slavic Village and offered cheap refinancing rates to homeowners, many of whom had lost jobs or insurance at an age when they could not keep up with expensive medical bills. “This was not some cycle of greed, with homeowners looking to make a fast buck as their properties appreciated,” Brancatelli told me. “They were good but gullible people, unschooled in even basic economics. They did not grasp that low payments that helped them out one day would balloon beyond what they had any chance at all of paying.” Many times, the councilman told me, flimflam agents would get their victims to sign the last page of a sheaf of quite legal documents, then switch all but the signatory page to paperwork filled with hopelessly unachievable payment terms.

Two of the “dots” on Cleveland’s foreclosure map

Unable to keep up, these people would be kicked out of what for many had been the only homes they’d known, forced to move in with relatives or leave Cleveland for good. They left behind so many red dots on a map of neighborhood foreclosures that, as an incisive New York Times investigation revealed, the map looked like it was splattered in blood.

Every Monday downtown, the Cuyahoga County sheriff would sell these foreclosed properties, most of which were scooped up by speculators, to be “bundled” and sold to another layer of speculators. Investors out of state bought them sight-unseen, and why not? Who could resist 100-year-old homes on the market for $10,000, $15,000, when some housing prices nationwide were doubling and tripling in value in a matter of months?

Sometimes the investors put the proverbial “lipstick on a pig,” sending out crews to slap on some paint and straighten loose boards, expecting to “flip” the properties for quick profit. Other times, long-distance buyers trusted that they could simply “hold the paper” and wait for even richer returns as the properties appreciated in value.

The scavengers have left nothing of value in this foreclosed, and stripped, Slavic Village home

Little did they realize that in home after home, scavengers – or “midnight plumbers,” as Michael Schramm, an analyst at Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development on Cleveland’s east side, calls them – were prying loose the plywood and stripping the places nearly bare, carting off every fixture, length of copper pipe, and fireplace. Scrapyards, paying good money for these stolen remnants, popped up all through the shadows of Slavic Village. That left some blocks looking like the aftermath of Katrina, without the hurricane.

Tearing Down American Dreams

This would be the fate of many homes that many people far away thought might make a tidy investment

Some home purchasers who sincerely thought they were getting a bargain and would fix up a place to live in found the destruction so complete, or the back taxes and cost of correcting housing-code violations so steep, that they write the whole experience off as a loss. Each time, that left one more empty house of horrors on one more block.

Citywide, the sheriff sold about 2,000 foreclosed homes in the year 2000. According to Michael Schramm, almost five times that many “sheriff’s deeds” were recorded each week in 2007, the last year for which numbers are available. Overall this decade, more than 1 in every 12 residential properties in the county has ended up in the sheriff’s hands.

The bulldozer is about to take the last bite out of an abandoned home

And, Schramm says, the city is tearing down about a thousand “O.V.V.’s” a year – sometimes blocks at a time. O.V.V. is short for “open, vacant, and vandalized.” “They’d like to ‘mothball’ more of them,” he says, keeping them intact until the economic malaise passes and the homes can be refurbished. But the scavengers are ripping apart abandoned houses beyond salvation.

Sometimes the foreclosed family itself wreaks the destruction, out of fury and spite, or just to pull a fragment of value out of their ill-fated home.

Meanwhile, mortgage predators took advantage of a federal voucher program intended to give poor, often African-American, people a shot at home ownership. The government paid a good chunk of the cost to get voucher recipients into homes that they simply could not afford. These voucher recipients, like older white “ethnics,” became easy pickings for the pack of real estate wolves.

In the last, interim census count, Slavic Village, was 30 percent African-American. Brancatelli figures it will be 50 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, and just 35 percent non-Hispanic white when figures roll in from the 2010 census. The total population, if the number of abandoned houses – “dead carcasses,” Tony Brancatelli calls them – and churches that are closing (three of the eight big Catholic ones) are an indication, is sure to be way down.

Cries For Help Fall on Deaf Ears

This home won’t be fixed any time soon

The Cleveland police cannot keep up with the vandals and scavengers. In a perverse irony, they have had to release many of those they caught because no bank or mortgage agent would claim ownership of the property. “That’s [banks’] mantra, Judge Pianka told the New York Times. “‘We don’t own it.’ It’s handy for them to say, ‘Oh, it’s not us.’ It’s part of this big shell game they’re playing.”

The original homeowner was long gone, so there was no one left to press charges. The only crime for which the scavengers and squatters could be charged was trespassing, a trivial misdemeanor.

And thus “a cycle of abandonment” would blight a proud but already fraying old neighborhood.

Even the “good guys in the white hats” like Brancatelli’s former redevelopment agency, inadvertently contributed to that cycle by paying top dollar for properties on which they would build new homes and condo developments. That boosted valuations of the entire neighborhood, including distressed and empty houses, making them even more enticing to quick-sell property buyers called “flippers.”

This butcher shop is one of many in Slavic Village that have sold their last kielbasa

Cleveland prosecuted many predatory speculators, driving some companies out of town. The FBI and federal housing authorities raided the offices of mortgage agents and real estate appraisers, some of whom had been complicit in grossly inflating paper value of modest homes and lots throughout the city. Brancatelli and others even testified in Congress and got strong anti-predatory-lending legislation passed in City Council. But in an atmosphere in which home values were still skyrocketing nationally and President George Bush was extolling the free market and home ownership, Ohio’s State Supreme Court struck down the Cleveland law. As County Treasurer Rokakis would tell the U.S. Congress in testimony early in 2007, when Fleet Avenue – one of Slavic Village’s main thoroughfares – cried out for help, no one listened. But when Wall Street screamed from the pain of the housing crisis, and massive foreclosures hit neighborhoods in fashionable California and Florida and Nevada, the nation and its government sprang into action.

A family once loved this humble place they called home

“Selling somebody a loan they don’t need or can’t afford should cost mortgage brokers their license,” Rokakis told the lawmakers. And when a family cannot make the payments loses their home, “you will never be able to put a dollar amount on the heartbreak, pain, and distress – never.”

"We Love This Place"

Surprisingly, you don’t see many “FORECLOSED” signs in Slavic Village. In fact, Carol and I found not a one. What’s the point, Tony Brancatelli told me. Everybody knows those boarded-up homes have been foreclosed. Instead, you see signs that say, “We Buy Cheap Houses,” or “$750 Flat Fee, We’ll Sell Your Home.”

This new development took the place of ruined and foreclosed homes

In Slavic Village, the City Council, and the nonprofit redevelopment agency are doing what they can to keep up appearances and spirits. “We’re revising the neighborhood,” Brancatelli says. The city is demolishing house after derelict house, replacing them with new one-family homes, blocks of condos, and clean, modern senior centers. They’re clearing out boarded-up homes next to factories that are still viable, offering the companies attractive rates to expand. They’re putting in parks and football fields, running trails on old rail spurs, and starting urban gardens. And where a gutted house stands between two that are intact and occupied, they’re sometimes even tearing down the eyesore and deeding half of the newly vacant property to each of the two neighbors for free.

This year, for the first time in most people’s memories, there won’t be a Polish Festival in Slavic Village. It’s not so much because of the foreclosure crisis or demographic stresses, Brancatelli says. “We have peacefully integrated.” The problem, he says, is that these events are beginning to cost too much to put on and to insure. And besides, there aren’t many carnival-type vendors of good quality left that will bring their rides and game booths into small neighborhoods.

This is Carnegie Avenue, a block off the heart of downtown Cleveland, an hour or so before what would be a nonexistent weekday afternoon “rush hour”

The city as a whole was a shock to me. The heart of a large American city at 4 o’clock on a weekday afternoon should be frantic with activity and honking horns. That was certainly my memory of Public Square and surroundings long ago. The adjacent photograph shows a hardly occupied Carnegie Avenue, one block off Public Square, on a Monday at 4 today. Not yet tumbleweed territory, but a sad reflection of urban distress. The department stores of my childhood are empty or occupied – ground level only – by tacky nightclubs, cheap wig shops and the like. We counted just one big ship in port. Only the outlines of once-regal bank names appear on what were thriving bank branches.

This is a piece of a truly grand Soldiers’ and Sailors' Monument on Public Square. It’s a vestige of days when no P.R. campaign was needed to describe the city some called “The Greatest Location in the Nation”

A lot of people in town think it’s time for a new civic-pride campaign to perk up a city that is depressed physically, economically, and psychologically. No matter one’s own circumstances, just living next door to a gutted house where a vibrant family once cut the grass and brought over some beer for a cookout or flour for a recipe is daunting. And just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling one in the form of abandoned houses all around you lowers your property value and your spirits, no matter how well you keep your own place up.

I can’t see people in this gritty city embracing hollow public-relations sloganeering. Already, save for the government and hotel workers and those who work in the few banks and stores that remain, many Clevelanders and most suburbanites had stopped going downtown. There are pockets of life in the old, industrial sector called the “Flats” along the lake, which is now an entertainment district popular with young people and tourists. And the ballpark and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame get respectable traffic from locals and tourists.

Slavic Village, far from the tourist district, struggles on as boards cover so many home windows, and heavy brown paper the windows of so many stores. Resolve, rather than optimism, defines the neighborhood mood. Tony Brancatelli says, “We love this place too much to give in.”

A Breeze

Over the dozens of times I’ve headed northwest out of Washington, D.C., including this time on my trip to Cleveland, I’ve passed through and marveled at a little town called Breezewood in the middle of Pennsylvania.

I say “town,” but it’s a one with no downtown, no Main Street, no hardware store or small-town grocery store, not even a mayor. Yet it’s pulsing with activity 24 hours a day!

Breezewood is a crossroads. Not the old, countrified kind with a gas station and a little store on the corner, but a point where two mighty interstate highways converge. They are the east-to-west Pennsylvania Turnpike, which crosses that state, from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and beyond toward Ohio, and Interstate 70, which begins at Breezewood and winds south to Baltimore, Maryland, with a spur to Washington. Wikipedia says a “breezewood,” in “road geek,” is a place where two big highways meet, though I’ve never heard it used that way. Since I-70 does take travelers southward out of the Appalachian Mountains and into lower and warmer climes, Breezewood is sometimes called the Gateway to the South.

This is not-so-beautiful “downtown” Breezewood, which doesn’t have a downtown at all

But it has another, more apt nickname: the “Town of Motels.” I’d lengthen it to read “Town of Motels and Countless Gas Stations and Lots of Fast-Food Restaurants and Plenty of Cheap Souvenir Shops and Noisy Truck Stops and Not a Whole Lot More.”

But that wouldn’t all fit on the Welcome sign.

You name it. If it has a Pittsburgh Steelers’ football insignia on it, you can probably get it here

The location has long been an east-west stop, first for Ohio-bound stagecoaches, then buses and adventuresome auto enthusiasts traveling U.S. 30 – the Lincoln Highway – and finally, for millions of Americans traversing the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In 2003, when a Pittsburgh newspaper came up with the last estimate I’ve seen, 3.4 million vehicles exited the turnpike through Breezewood. These days, even with travel reduced a bit during the economic slowdown, probably 4 million or more drivers and their passengers take a food, gasoline, and bathroom break each year in this notch in the mountains.

This is one of the newer hostelries in the City of Motels. Note the farm just behind it. You’re in the country ─ and in a maze of commercial places beckoning tourists ─ all at once in Breezewood

Carol and I were two of them, and she snapped a few photos. Looking at them, I think you’ll concur with a New York Times description of Breezewood from almost 20 years ago: It is, said the Times – and it goes double today – “perhaps the purest example yet devised of the great American tourist trap . . . the Las Vegas of roadside strips, a blaze of neon in the middle of nowhere, a polyp on the nation’s interstate highway system.”

A “polyp on the highway” that’s also plenty good for business in Bedford County, Pennsylvania.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Apogee. Informally, the word is used to mean the high point of something. Technically, it’s the point at which a moon or artificial satellite is at the most distant point in its orbit from the earth’s center.

Extol. To praise or laud someone’s virtues, sometimes lavishly.

Flimflam. A swindle, especially one that convinces others to buy worthless or overvalued property.

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Culturating

This time out, I want to explore some aspects of American culture. Not the flute-recital kind, though I’ve long thought of culture in that regard. Rather, a glance at several other aspects, some of which aren’t cultured at all.

Pop culture’s not quite like this. Although, come to think of it, sometimes people in it don’t wear many clothes, either

There’s also something called “popular culture” that, we’re told, appeals to “the masses.” We’re definitely not talking flutes there. Pop culture is hard to define, but it certainly embraces escapist movies and hit music, fan magazines and ever-expanding varieties of sports, plus some activities that are neither elevating nor especially enlightening. Soft and hard-core pornography, for example; violent, misogynist urban music; and insipid television shows. All the while pop-culture diversions consume our attention and dollars, sources of at least moderate erudition are diminishing in influence. Newspapers, for instance. They even covered the occasional flute recital.

When I first switched from print journalism to broadcasting, it was explained to me that television, in particular, wasn’t a highbrow medium, and I shouldn’t expect it to be. “The tube’s” programming was sugar and spice, not fiber – filling but hardly nutritious and aimed at the “lowest common denominator” among us. Whatever generates the highest ratings, slips even just a whisker above the bar of good taste, and attracts the most advertiser dollars is fine with us. Interesting concept, that “lowest common denominator.” The term comes from mathematics, where the lowest common denominator is “the least common multiple of the denominators of a set of vulgar fractions.”

If vulgarisms are good enough for arithmetic, they’re good enough for the “Morning Zoo” on the radio and “comedy” shows on TV.

Television was going to be a great educational tool. It’s teaching us things, all right

Standards have been diminished to the lowest level that will reach a palatable, unremarkable, “common ground” of interest among the most possible people. And the level of what’s acceptable keeps falling. Since everybody stares at highway wrecks, we’ll program police chases and car crashes! Since everybody on cable has a potty mouth, but there are certain words we can’t say over the air, we’ll joke about bodily functions and sexual dysfunctions instead. We’ll put on the overwrought love stories that we call “soap operas” day and night. Hey, opera is cultural!

Go ahead, say the producers and their financiers. Demean “trash TV.” But you’ll watch it.

This was an early set of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Fun! Balloons! $100,000!

“Pop culture” and “culture culture” sometimes converge. This was evident the other day when the National Museum of American History, one of the storied Smithsonian Institution museums that line the National Mall here in Washington, welcomed into its collection priceless objects from the 20-year-old TV reality show “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Yes, my tongue was in my cheek about the “priceless” part.

Juggler. Dog on head. Could be a winner!

What a concept that show introduced to the country! You make “home movies,” but not boring stuff like Cousin Sue’s passing the potato salad at a picnic. No, you wait for the kids or the pets or visiting relatives to act stupid or go wild. Stage something if you have to. Pratfalls are good. Wet cats and eating contests work. Dogs running into things. Then rush us the tape. Who knows? You could get on TV and win money! Disastrous developments involving weddings, animals and pets, and babies are such sure-fire laugh engines that they have their own categories. “Baby farts a cloud” of talcum powder was one illustrious example. What mirth that brought the nation! And mom and dad got on TV and won money!

Is it worth lighting the powder to get on TV?

So what if an amazon.com compilation of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” is entitled, “Nincompoops and Boneheads.” We weren’t getting on TV and winning money being Ma and Pa Homeowner alone. Let’s have Uncle Martin catch his pants on a nail and run down the street in his underwear! Then we can be famous nincompoops getting television face time and cash!

Lowest-common-denominator stuff, dumbing down both television and the “culture.” Not just ours. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” is now seen in more than 70 countries and produced in 15 international versions. Who says we have an export problem?

The first of many Smithsonian Institution Buildings, called “the Castle,” once held the whole collection, from elephant tusks to everyday ephemera

The United States Congress created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, naming it after the British scientist James Smithson, who had died 20 years earlier. Smithson, who had never visited America, mysteriously left his estate to the United States to establish an institution that would, in the words of his will: "increase and diffuse knowledge among men."

Here are some of the items that will become part of the American History museum’s “Funniest Home Videos” collection

That knowledge, the Smithsonian now wants us to believe, was “increased and diffused” by the addition of an “America’s Funniest Home Videos” camcorder, the first winning video to be shown on the show, a machine that the studio audience uses to pick winners, and more. The items were presented to the Americana museum by Vin Di Bona, “Funniest Home Videos’” creator and executive producer, whose other TV triumphs include “Battle of the Network Stars” and “Entertainment Tonight.”

Believe it or not, the Smithsonian’s American History museum’s holdings include a small stretch of Old U.S. Route 66 - concrete, cracks, and all

To be sure, the National Museum of American History has never been terribly stuffy. Its collection does include U.S. First Ladies’ gowns, the flag that flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore when Francis Scott Key scribbled the words to our national anthem, World War II ration books, plus early automobiles, clocks, engines of various sorts, and household appliances. But it also houses daredevil Evil Knievel’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Kermit the Frog puppet from the children’s show “Sesame Street,” the ruby-colored slippers worn by Judy Garland in the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” a gumball machine featuring a likeness from the early Pac-Man video game, and Archie Bunker’s easy chair from the TV show “All in the Family.” Bunker was the bigoted, loudmouthed, but warmhearted lead character.

Band member falls offstage. This could be big. Did anybody catch it on camcorder?

Now, at last! tourists visiting the museum can see the first episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” in which a man tumbles off exercise parallel bars, a bride falls on her face while dancing, and a baby licks the camera lens! The show hadn’t found its oeuvre yet. The genius of inadvertent kicks to the groin and baby farts with talcum powder was yet to come.

“One of my thrusts has been to collect artifacts of comedy,” noted Dwight Blocker Bowers, the museum’s curator of music, sports, and entertainment. “We’re very interested that part of the American character is laughing at ourselves.”

Don’t get me started on the “American character.”

Of late, Newton Minow, now 83, hangs out in Chicago, where he’s honorary consul general of Singapore

In 1961, Newton R. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television and other broadcast media to a minimal degree, delivered a speech for which he is still remembered. That’s because the relevance of his remarks has intensified with time. That day 48 years ago, he said:

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

“But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Ah! The substance of much TV fare, captured in one photograph!

Wasteland then. Source of carefully cultivated refinement today. Consider the 10 top-rated U.S. TV shows for the week ending April 5::

(1 and 2): The Tuesday and Wednesday airings of “American Idol,” in which thousands of unknowns sing, some get savagely ridiculed, and the winner gets a big recording contract. (3) “Dancing With the Stars,” in which celebrities – often sports notables – sashay around a ballroom with professional dancers. (4 and 8) “NCIS” and “CSI,” two shows involving scientific investigation of dastardly deeds (5) “The Mentalist,” in which a psychic helps the white-lab-coat crowd solve crimes (6) “ER,” a rather bloody emergency-room drama (7) a country-music awards show (9) “Two and a Half Men,” a comedy about a “freewheeling,” hedonistic bachelor, his divorced brother, and his “underachieving” nephew, and (10) a college basketball tournament game.

Some day, if he’s still at his post, curator Bowers can add artifacts from these shows to the nation’s Americana collection.

***

We Don’t Want No Knowledge

For about a year I’ve held onto a New York Times clipping whose content seems to fit perfectly here. Entitled, “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” it’s a story about Susan Jacoby, a scholar of American intellectual history, and her book, The Age of American Unreason.

Magnificent Budapest, the capital of Europe!

The story’s writer, Patricia Cohen, described two truly humiliating examples of the woeful ignorance that many Americans exhibit when it comes to events beyond their noses. In one, a contestant from “American Idol” appears on the TV game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” – a risky premise if there ever was one. She was asked, from a third-grade geography book, “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” Her answer: “I thought Europe was a country.”

Guffaw.

Then in the Times story, Jacoby described overhearing a conversation in a New York bar on September 11, 2001, the day that terrorist-piloted planes leveled the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” she heard one of the men say.

The Pearl Harbor attack did occur in a harbor. But half an ocean away from Vietnam

“What is Pearl Harbor?” asked the other.

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” came the reply.

Ignorance used to be bliss. Now it’s just ignorant.

Nattering Nabob of Negativism?

Spiro Agnew, who needled the media with zippy putdown lines, once said, "If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all."

The ‘nattering’ quote was uttered by President Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, who was speaking in 1970 about “eastern effete” members of the media. Agnew, a former Maryland governor, was a rumpled and, we all soon learned, corrupt man who had also opined that an intellectual is “a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.” He did not share his views about women and bikes.

De Tocqueville expected to find a backward country but came away from his trip stunned by Americans’ drive and grit

A VOA colleague with whom I shared some of my disillusionment about popular culture did not call me a nattering nabob or a poor bike-parker to my face, but she did remind me that cultural pessimism is hardly new or revolutionary. Nineteenth Century French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville, after a long expedition across the young United States, concluded that we were a shallow, restless, ever-changing, money-driven lot. And my friend pointed out that our newspapers once produced sensationalist and scurrilous “yellow journalism” of little substance, our early television brought us such classics as “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Elvis Presley was denounced in his day as someone whose pelvic gyrations might bring down the republic, and whose rock-‘n’-roll music would ruin the entire world.

Some of today’s rappers have demonstrated keen insight into the human condition, she pointed out. Television has hundreds of channels whose intellectual fare would impress a Rhodes Scholar, and the Internet has put us in contact with concepts and cultures that some of the smartest among us never knew existed.

Cultures like you find in that country over there. Europe.

***

We’re On Our Own

Washington Post columnist John Kelly recently profiled what surely must be one of the last elevator operators in the area. Charlie Patterson was retiring after 44 years of manually closing the elevator door and yanking the control lever that directed the cab to various floors. Most Americans over 60 remember nattily attired elevator operators in big office buildings and department stores. They were virtual tour guides: “Six! Ladies’ apparel, sportswear, costume jewelry,” they would cry out.

This elevator operator in Washington’s Barr Building was caught on film in 1941, the very year VOA’s elevator ops began their work across town

Here at the Voice of America’s headquarters building, just off the National Mall in Washington, some old-timers dimly remember operators on duty inside our nine gleaming, polished-brass elevators. I found two women who worked as clerks in the building shortly after it opened in 1941 as the temporary home of various War Department branches and commissions. One of them, Marjorie Downey, remembers these “lift” operators – along with cafeteria workers – as some of few black faces seen in the building in those highly segregated days, when we also had separate sets of bathrooms for whites and “Negroes.” These operators wore crisp, maroon uniforms with white shirts and ties, Marjorie recalls. She can even quote what she calls “their standard phrase": "All the way to the back and face the front!"

And since the building was full of military types, people no doubt did what they were told.

What really caught my eye was Kelly’s aside that, in the years since Charlie Patterson first ran elevators in Washington’s Ring Building, “we’ve gotten used to doing things for ourselves – things that others once did for us.” Besides running our elevators way back when, he noted, someone pumped our gas, bagged our groceries, and “rang up” our purchases at the store.

Kelly’s list can be greatly expanded. While Americans think of ourselves as pampered, speed, convenience, and, especially, cost-saving have imposed self-reliance upon us. My Miami friend, Marc Kuhn, helped me compile some examples:

Note the relaxed driver, foot on the rear bumper, watching as someone besides himself pumps his gas

• We pump our own gas. I can’t remember the last time anyone spoke these words: “Check your oil?” Forget cleaning the windshield. You’re lucky to find your own vat of dirty water and a torn squeegee wedged between the pumps. This may be the one and only reason I love the State of New Jersey. There by law, only attendants may pump gas, yet the price somehow manages to be cheaper than in the surrounding states.

Sometimes it took three or four switchboard operators to get your call from one part of the country to another

• Where an elite corps of “long-distance operators” once placed all of our out-of-town telephone calls, we now do our own with the push of 12 or 13 buttons. Delivery people used to bring us our milk, bread, pastries, clean laundry, and, to some houses, coal. Now we schlep out and get these things ourselves. And of course we make our own ice; no one that I know of hoists blocks of it on his shoulder, using unwieldy tongs, any longer. If we get a hankering for a sweet ice confection called a “Popsicle” – or a Creamsicle with a dab of filling or an “Eskimo Pie” ice-cream bar – only a drive to the supermarket or “convenience” store will satisfy it. The white trucks of “Good Humor men,” with their tinkling bells and freezers full of treats, are a rarity, although I’ve heard there are some “Mr. Softee” trucks still around.

• Most of us book our own airplane reservations and buy and print our tickets, rather than relying on airline or travel agents. Airlines, in fact, charge us extra if we ask them to do it. We scrounge for most of our own motel and rental-car reservations, maps and directions, and theatre and sports tickets online as well.

• We mostly pick out our own clothes, including shoes, on the Web or from piles on tables in stores, rather than enlisting the counsel of suave sales personnel and tailors. And if we find a grocery-store clerk who knows where to find the peas, or someone in a work apron in a home-improvement store who can navigate through 400 kinds of screws, we’re giddy with joy.

Not only do scanners “ring you up” at the checkout counter, but now there are devices that customers carry down the aisles to record purchases as they go

• There are still checkout cashiers, but more and more store lines lead to unmanned machines. Like dutiful ants, when we reach them, we scan our own crackers or minestrone soup or fresh avocados, and then bag ‘em ourselves. I, for one, defeat the store’s best labor-saving intentions. Staring at the evil, blinking, beeping beast of a machine, I grow hopelessly confused, mistaking arugula for bibb lettuce and entering entirely the wrong code, thus requiring the assistance of an understanding clerk after all.

• Physicians – and TV repairmen – used to come to our houses! Now it takes an executive order, or two weeks’ notice, to get an appointment at the doctor’s office, there to wait another hour next to other sick people, beneath the scowls of the office staff, who must not be disturbed while they enter various billing codes for the “treatment” other patients have been privileged to receive. By the time you get in, you’re well! As for TV service, when a set breaks down we mostly junk it, go to a “big box” electronics store, buy a bigger one, somehow lift it into the trunk, tie it down with a piece of greasy rope we found under the tool kit we've never opened, and lug it home.

Lemme tell you: This doesn’t look like the lunch places across from VOA. They're strictly pay-up-front and pick-up-your-food joints

• Waitresses or waiters used to bring us our coffee or sandwiches at lunch counters or diner booths. Now we stand in line to pay $4 for a barista-brewed Cup of Joe, buy sandwiches out of a machine or from a vendor, and, as often as not, eat lunch at our desks. Lunch places still have tables, but increasingly you go get your own food and beverage at a counter, pay for them, and bring them there.

• And speaking of service, I’d like to know the last time anyone found a strolling cigarette girl, a nightclub photographer, or a shoeshine boy. (Never saw a shoeshine girl.) Now we bring own tobacco products, take our own photos – on our cell phones! – and polish our own shoes.

• Tellers took our money, or gave us some, at the bank. Now, “automated teller” machines do most of this, and different machines count and deposit our loose change. We don’t tote our paychecks to the bank. One computer at the office whisks our meager earnings via still more computers straight into our accounts.

• Not just top executives but also mid-level professionals used to employ the services of their own secretaries or, at a minimum, clerks in the “typing pool.” Now the word “secretary” is an epithet, beneath the dignity of the boss’s “executive assistant.” Call her – or him, he said, enlighteningly – a secretary, and you’ll be brought up on charges. We type our stuff, do our own research using computer search engines, and buzz our own way into buildings that long ago eliminated their “front desk” personnel. Usually, too, we open our own doors – “doorman” being another fast-disappearing occupation.

Do this! Do that! And don’t expect me to do it for you, bud

So we’re not so pampered after all. And one of the results is that we sometimes feel like the ball in a pinball machine, whacked here and there amid a lot of noise. If we’re lucky, we schedule some contemplation, maybe on a vacation whose arrangements we make for ourselves. I don’t mind pressing my own elevator button, or opening my own door, or typing this blog for myself. But writing about all this makes me want to pack the car and hit the road. For New Jersey, where someone might ask me, “Check the oil?” once again.

***

Vision of Things to Come?

One of the recent “Bizarro” cartoons by the brilliant Dan Piraro showed a reasonable likeness of New York City’s central library, with its lofty set of stairs, regal columns, and sentinel lion.

Out front, Piraro drew an ornate stone tablet into which is chiseled:

MUSEUM OF THE INTERNET
Formerly the New York Public Library

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Cup of Joe. A cup of coffee. The term could relate to the average American – the “average Joe,” or perhaps it dates to World War I, when U.S. admiral Josephus Daniels broke with naval tradition by banning alcohol, including wine in the officers’ mess, aboard American ships. Thereafter coffee – deridingly called a ‘cup of Joe – was the strongest brew on board.

Guffaw. A boisterous laugh.

Highbrow. Having or demonstrating culture, refinement, and taste.

Nabob. Originally a Mogul high official, the term came to be associated with executives of the British East India Company and, later, of any highly placed – and perhaps a tad pompous – individuals.

Nattering. Chattering, usually about things of little importance.

Oeuvre. A work, or life’s work, of art, music, or film. This word is often used somewhat pretentiously, since “one’s oeuvre” sounds terribly cultured.
Pratfall. An often humiliating slip or fall, fast, onto one’s backside. “Prat” was an Old English term for one’s buttocks.

Schlep. From Yiddish: to tediously drag oneself someplace.

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Little of This, Little of That

Less than a year ago, I was privileged to interview John Hope Franklin, who was 93 but retained the sharp mind and sunny outlook that had marked his entire bountiful life. He was the distinguished scholar and pioneer of African-American studies who helped Americans rediscover, and rethink, the impact of slavery on the nation's history.

Upon his death in late March, VOA recast most of that interview as a Franklin tribute. You may have missed it, and I want to share parts of it so that you can get the measure of this remarkable, inspirational man.

John Hope Franklin was a quiet man with steel resolve and a view of the human condition that wmbodied his name: hope

"John Hope Franklin, the son of the South, has always been a moral compass for America – always pointing us in the direction of truth," President Bill Clinton said in 1995 as he awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

In 1921, as a 6-year-old boy in an impoverished, all-black Oklahoma town, Franklin, the grandson of a slave, watched in terror as white rioters torched African-American neighborhoods in nearby Tulsa and burned his father's law office to the ground.

But he would carry no bitterness or hatred into adulthood. Rather, he was suffused with determination to learn, to excel, to illuminate the full and true story of his people. Franklin did so well at historically black Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee, that he was admitted to graduate school at the acclaimed Harvard University. But the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression. Neither he nor his family could afford the tuition that Harvard demanded. These were agonizing moments until his mentor, a Fisk history professor, intervened.

"A young white man – I was 20 years old; he was 32 - went downtown and borrowed $500 and put it in my hand and said, 'Money will not keep you out of Harvard,' Franklin told me. “And he sent me off to Harvard the next day. Well, if that was a low point, it was also a high point, too, for I was back on track."

Somehow it’s not surprising that Franklin loved orchids, one of nature’s gentlest and most fragile flowers

On track to one day write the most acclaimed account of the enslavement of African-Americans in the Old South. The book, From Slavery to Freedom, would sell more than three million copies. It shattered the image of complacent, dimwitted slaves. And it described slave rebellions and little-known achievements of free black men and women – even in the hateful South.

Behind The Landmark Brown v. Board Case

It was Franklin whose research at the Library of Congress had helped civil-rights lawyers convince the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw segregation in the nation's public schools a decade earlier. And it was he and other historians who were escorted to the head of a voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in the heart of the segregated South and in the midst of an angry crowd.

“To be very frank, I was frightened out of my wits," Franklin told a reporter. But he and the others marched steadfastly past the full-throated animus, and the spittle.

"Where does this depth of hatred of black people come from?" I asked him.

"It's a part of the rationalization or justification for slavery. You can't enslave your equals,” he replied. “So you've got to make your equals into something else – make them appear to be inferior and appear to deserve enslavement.”

Franklin taught history at several institutions, including Brooklyn College in New York, where he arrived as department chairman to find that all 52 people reporting to him were white.

"I had to remind myself that they were not like me in appearance. But so far as their human qualities were concerned, they could be just as I was. I could be just as they were."

Consider that last sentence one more time before we move on: “I could be just as they were.”

Turning Hate Upside Down

"I taught for nearly 70 years,” John Hope Franklin told me. “And I would like my students to take up where I left off and to carry on the fight to establish history as a powerful force for good – a constructive force to rectify the ills of our society – to change the world, as it were."

Franklin rejected the label "black historian" – insisting instead that he was a historian whose writing about all Americans has given substance to the black experience. In the same vein, he took some issue with the national practice of setting aside a single month, February, as "Black History Month."

Blacks, said John Hope Franklin, are part of American history every month of every year.

The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University “celebrates the spirit and scholarship” of the renowned historian

And here is one more, telling testament to his character, as told in the Washington Post by Walter Dellinger, his longtime colleague on the Duke University history faculty.

“He was no Pollyanna. He knew, as my son Drew once wrote, that we are still always crossing that bridge from Selma to Montgomery. But John Hope always looked at the state trooper blocking the bridge, the figure standing in the way of freedom, and saw there another child of God.”

Courage of His Convictions

Three marches from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery, in 1965 marked an emotional high point in the struggle for equal rights for all Americans

Imagine enduring the bile that day and staring at the signs: “Coonsville U.S.A.” and “Nigger Go Home.” Perhaps his mind’s eye saw again the flames consuming his father’s office or his mother’s apron behind which he had hid that childhood day. Surely, too, there were visions of the attack dogs and fire hoses loosed on African Americans elsewhere in Alabama.

There was no mistaking the menace in the baton brandished by the white trooper who blocked his path. Yet he found it in his heart to see before him “another child of God.”

It is that hand across the racial divide, I suspect – more even than his great book and his wise teachings – that the world will long and sorely miss about John Hope Franklin.

***

Double Dare You

John Hope Franklin and many others risked their lives for a just cause.

Others do so for . . . well, I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what for.

There’s a 2.3-meter bronze statue of Sir Edmund Hillary that looks up at Mount Cook – New Zealand’s highest mountain and one of the intrepid climber’s favorite peaks

They are what the Chicago Tribune once called “risk addicts” –people who have gone far beyond the British mountaineer Edmund Hillary, who famously explained in 1923 that he intended to climb Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, “because it’s there.”

Fire and Ice

You’ve seen these thrill seekers? daredevils? idiots? jumping off bridges while tethered to a springy cord that hurtles them a few meters short, if they’re lucky, of a canyon floor. They’re the folks who attempt to leap those same canyons, or rows of cars, or rings of fire in souped-up hot rods or cycles. They’re the snowboarders who zig-zag past lovely, unmovable fir trees at breakneck speed, the big-wave surfers, and the lion tamers, and the climbers of sheer ice as well.

Brendan Reals took this photo of a brave (or foolhardy) ice climber, a day after he had put down the camera and made the climb himself

Come to think of it, Carol’s assistant, Brendan Reals, whose stunning landscape photos you sometimes see here, is an avid ice climber! And a mountaineer and back-country hiker. The steeper the trail the better, back into places where real bears have real cubs and real fangs. Brendan would much rather lug a camera to the top of Alaska’s Mount McKinley than shoot up at it. Why? Not because it’s there, and not for the “rush” of cheating death, he tells me, but for the challenge of succeeding and the satisfaction of overcoming his fear.

This base jumper doesn’t need skis since there’s no snow on the cliff and since he’s simply going to leap into the void rather than glide down for “takeoff”

Brendan notes that just last week, 39-year-old “base jumper” Shane McConkey died in an accident while filming a movie in Italy. Base jumping, a sport that McConkey helped invent, involves skiing off a ledge and into an abyss in a “birdman” wingsuit, tossing off one’s skis, then deploying a parachute and drifting serenely to earth. Only this time, in Italy, one ski did not come loose, and McConkey spun wildly to his death. Brendan believes that he died, if not happy, certainly doing what he loved. While he lived, “Shane McConkey threw himself headlong off a mountain and into life,” as a Canadian alternative online newspaper put it.

The Genes Made Me Do It

“Some say brain chemistry causes a few to leap toward rather than avoid danger,” the Tribune’s Charles Duhigg wrote some years ago. “Others say daredevils are programmed by genes and childhood.”

Sure, blame Sigmund Freud or their mothers!

“As they jump off the bridge, their bodies start producing chemicals that are just like opiates,” Jay Holder, president of the American College of Addictionology & Compulsive Disorders, told the Trib. (I’m not kidding about the “addictionology” part of the title.) “It’s just like if someone stuck a needle in their arm with heroin. There is no difference in how they feel. It’s the same uncontrollable addiction.”

And here’s something curious that Tribune reporter Duhigg uncovered:

Think about it: Only two things separate this bungee jumper from a grisly death: a cord that’s JUST the right length short of the earth, and an ankle harness. Fun, right!

When most people are terrified and it’s “fear response,” flight-or-fight time, a powerful adrenaline rush kicks in. This happens to risk addicts, too, except that the adrenaline has quite the opposite effect: it calms them down, makes them feel “more ‘normal.’” Duhigg quotes a jumper who quit – sold every bit of paraphernalia he owned – after nine friends died jumping off bridges and canyon ledges within fourteen months. But he quit only because his girlfriend said she was outta there if he didn’t. Still, the jumper told the Tribune, “this is something I need to do.”

Sounds like a compulsion to me, though I only play a psychologist on the radio.

True risk addicts apparently try things in large measure just because they’re new. Then they quickly grow bored and move on to something else. A skydiver who jumps for the rush, not the panoramic scenery, won’t leap out of a slow-moving plane with full parachute time after time after time. He or she wants new challenges: piggybacking with another diver, perhaps, or tumbling ever closer to the earth – and death – before pulling the ripcord.

Taking Chances – Carefully

All the people on the left seem to be smiling as this roller coaster dips earthward. Those on the right display the look of sheer terror. I love coasters but fall into the “terror” group

We all have levels of acceptable risk. Mine, and probably yours, are pitifully low. As far as I’m concerned, “near-death experiences” aren’t something one elects to try! Maybe we’ll drive faster than we should on the highway – just the 12 or so km/h over the limit that we think is the threshold beyond which the patrol will pull us over. We’re most certainly not excited by the thought of, say, roaring down a dragstrip at 530 km/h. I’ll test the sickest roller coaster. Carol won’t set foot in the kiddie cups. Brendan would probably ride the “Beast” coaster standing up if he could get away with it.

Analysts of the nation’s recent economic upheavals pin some of the blame on risk-addicted traders of derivatives and other treacherous financial instruments. They risked their high-riding lifestyles, if not limbs, with every trade. And many of them lost.

Risk-takers “only know they must continue to beat the odds and outrun the chance of dying,” according to a Web site for something called the “Optimal Life Center.” “They are not aware of the danger to themselves and are oblivious to the threat to others, loved ones and/or strangers,” one article asserts. “Frequently the only way that risk takers or thrill seekers come into recovery is through grave injury. When the person has ridden the razor’s edge too close – resulting in injury, the death of someone else or the loss of a job or a family -- then reality hits home making the opportunity for change.”

Just a little harmless, heart-pounding, death-defying, fate-tempting exercise

Is risk-taking to the brink of death’s door some sort of “performance art” – an ego trip and a high, all in one? Students of this addiction say no, not usually. There’s a deep desire to stand out, but not much of a need to win or defeat others. That makes the “extreme sports” different from even the most violent competitive ones.

Save for the late Evil Knievel and other stunt riders of the world, people tend to take fewer and fewer risks as they age. We’re soon disabused of the “I’m going to live forever” certainty of youth.

Meet Mr. Mouse, risk addict

So what has this exploration of “addictionology” taught us? I don’t know about you, but it’s removed what speck of a thought of deliberately “cheating death” might have survived inside me. Thinking about daredevils and nine dead bungee jumpers and Brendan Reals’s climbs straight up ice-packed Poke-O-Moonshine Cliff in the New York Adirondacks, I may never so much as cross against the corner “DON’T WALK” signal again!

***

We Have With Us Today . . .

It’s fun to watch kinescopes of old, live television programs just to see the occasional missteps, tangled words, lapses of memory, collapses of stage props, and other gaffes. Today most shows are taped, and the audience never sees these “outtakes.” They’re zapped in the editing process.

There are still some live radio and television broadcasts – mostly newscasts and sports coverage – but even these often employ a seven-second delay system that allows alert producers to wipe out “bloopers” before they reach the air.

Still, a few “doosies” slip in, as my mother used to say. Not only did I hear one the other night, but it lasted several minutes!

This is more or less the broadcaster’s view of the action at St. Louis Blues’ games. For their play-by-play man one night, though, the excitement would be in the booth!

I am a big ice-hockey fan, so much so that I sometimes tune into National Hockey League play-by-play on satellite radio. Not just the games of my hometown Washington Capitals, but also contests between other teams. This broadcast originated in St. Louis, where the Blues were playing the visiting Vancouver Canucks.

A break in the action allowed the play-by-play announcer to fit in a short interview. This is common practice in broadcast sports. He introduced his guest as a marketing executive from one of the team’s radio sponsors. The man was there to describe his company’s generous gift to the local children’s hospital.

I wasn’t recording the game and didn’t have a pencil handy to take notes, but the conversation ran into trouble –“went south,” as we sometimes say – right from the start.

Keep in mind that marketing men and women are hired in part for their gift of gab. Give them the chance to tout their products or companies, and normally you can’t shut them up.

Nightmare Above Center Ice

The “interview” went something like this. I’ll make up the names:

JOE WRISTSHOT, HOCKEY ANNOUNCER: “We’re pleased that Bill Smithers has joined us here in the booth. He’s the marketing vice president for Jones Grocers here in St. Louis. And Bill, I understand Jones Grocers has just made quite a contribution to the community.”

GUEST, after a slight pause: “Uh . . . yeah.”

JOE WRISTSHOT – obviously taken aback by the brevity of the response: “You’ve sent a big check to Children’s Hospital!!”

GUEST, after an even more uncomfortable interlude: “Yeah.”

Joe Wristshot was crying the blues, all right

At this point, you can almost hear announcer Wristshot asking himself, “What’s wrong with this guy? How do I dig out of this?”

But he perseveres:

“Something about asthma research, right, Bill?”


This time the pause is pregnant. GUEST: . . . “I guess.”

Now it’s Announcer Wristshot who’s at a loss for words. It was becoming a “somebody-help-me” moment. I sensed at this point that his producer was telling him something in his earpiece.

ANNOUNCER WRISTSHOT: “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. You’re not Bill Smithers!!! You’re Jim Gamble from Greenville, Illinois, one of our great season-ticket holders!!”

GUEST, relieved: “Yup.”

Apparently the Blues invite some of their hard-core fans to come on the air from time to time. This helps efforts to sell season-ticket packages to other listeners. This night, the “lucky” fan is poor Gamble. Already probably terrified to be in front of a microphone and confronted with the most bizarre of questions, he had no idea how to tell Joe Wristshot – let alone his family, his buddies, and thousands of hockey fans who were listening –that he wasn’t grocer Bill Smithers and didn’t know a thing about a hospital gift.

By this time, the announcer’s broadcast partner, the “color commentator,” is chuckling. “Ah, live radio!!”

The Fun Had Just Begun

The guest’s true identity revealed, Wristshot manfully tries to interview him. Gamble the fan proves to be only slightly more articulate than he was as the stammering “grocery guy.” “I thought I’d help you out” by playing along, he tells the announcer.

Finally, mercifully, Wristshot bids Gamble adieu: “You’ve been a real sport, Jim,” the play-by-play man says. “Your next Budweiser is on me.”

But the torment isn’t quite over.

These two might as well have been Joe’s “guests” during the break in the hockey action

Almost immediately, down sits the actual Bill Smithers. He and Wristshot and the color guy have a nervous laugh about the faux pas, and the real grocery spokesman does indeed speak robustly about the children’s hospital gift.

As a broadcaster, I certainly sympathized with the flummoxed Joe Wristshot. Here he is, busy watching and describing the action on the ice below when a stranger sits down next to him. There’s no time for more than a quick handshake with the man who, he

This is how broadcasters caught in an untenable situation feel as their every humiliation is carried to thousands or millions – live

assumes, is the grocery chain’s p.r. guy. Obviously either Wristshot got his guest lineup out of order, or his producers escorted the wrong fellow into the booth.

I have little doubt that when the game was over, Joe Wristshot was muttering to himself, “Hockey is rough, tough, even violent. But who knew that interviewing was an extreme sport?”

***

Fuzzy Math

You may have seen reader Kirk's comment at the end of my last posting, in which I described an unlikely, but intriguing, theory that giving stimulus money to older workers rather than banks or corporations might do more to jump-start the economy. Kirk wrote, "While I admire your hope in a patriotic Retirement, I would hope you would examine the math of Mr. Otterson's proposal. 40,000,000 people x $1,000,000 is $40 Trillion dollars. Perhaps an edit of your most recent post would be in order."

I have a really, really lame excuse for this error. Two of them, really, and the second is just as pathetic. None of my calculators, including the ones I could find online, could handle enough digits to give the result of multiplying 40,000,000 x 1,000,000! Yet the answer is obvious if you write it as 40 million times 1 million. But I was too dense to do that. The second excuse is that my trusty editor also tried multiplying all those zeroes and came out with the same $4 million answer. (His calculators didn't compute that high a figure, either.) Looks like I have two choices for the future: keep the math simple, or ask for Kirk's help before I post!

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Animus. Hatred bordering on active hostility. Wishing ill will on another.

Color Commentator. The broadcast partner of a sports play-by-play announcer. The “color man” (or woman) is often an ex-athlete who can add depth and analysis to what’s happening in the game.

Flummoxed. Flustered, confused, perplexed by what’s going on around you.

Gift of Gab. Ability to speak knowledgeably and informally, often for long periods of time.

P.R. Short for “public relations.” Many companies and famous people have an army of “p.r. men” (or women) to polish their images.

Steadfast. Holding firm in one’s stand or convictions.

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