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I will have lots to say about TT over the next two years. For example, there are some amazing beaches.
Right now, though, this is happening, at 9:00 PM on a work night.
And it isn’t even Carnival season. This is going to be a long two years.
Next, hopefully: relaxing photographs and videos from the beach.
St. Louis is known as the Gateway to the West, which means that it also is the Gateway to the East if you’re going in that direction—as we were. And this is the final post of the trip, since after St. Louis, we simply drove for two days to get back home in time for Thanksgiving.
So, outside and inside the Arch: one ascends the arch in a cramped, two-seater train car that runs on a combination elevator-escalator track.
The view from the top:
Next: no next!
Kansas City has the Chiefs and good barbeque, which I expected …
… but it’s also a good museum city. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has an impressive collection, but the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures was an unexpected pleasure. Tiny furniture, reproductions of famous paintings, an architecture classroom, a jewelry store, French salons, even tiny dollhouses: it is a cornucopia of myopia.
The toys were amazing for different reasons: kids’ (or their parents’) historical ideas of fun, plus gender roles and morals on display. The Game of the Telegraph Boy, for example, teaches its players how to advance from messenger boy to company president through integrity, diligence, and affability; but show laziness or intemperance, and it’s a demotion for you. Plus historical artifacts, toys I had as a kid, and toys I’m glad I didn’t have as a kid.
Next: St. Louis.
I posted about this on Facebook when I visited the place in November, but for those of you not on Facebook (good for you) …
Between April 27 and April 28, 2024, 35 tornados hit Oklahoma. One of the tornados, on April 27, ran through Sulphur. It was an EF3-level tornado, meaning a tornado with wind speeds of 136-165 mph. It damaged 200 buildings, flattening 70 of them completely.
Next: Goin’ to Kansas City, Kansas City here we come.
The World’s Largest Ball of Twine
Somewhere in the Code of Federal Regulations (I think) , it says “It isn’t a cross-country roadtrip unless you visit the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.” Welcome to Cawker City, KS.
Sometime in 1953, a farmer named Frank Stoeber (above) began to gather up the loose twine that had been used to tie up bales of hay—which was cluttering his barn floor—and roll it into a ball to burn it. Instead of burning it, however, he simply continued to add twine to the ball, and neighboring farmers added their loose twine to the collection. By 1956, it was 7′ 5″ in diameter and weighed 4,305 lbs.
The ball attracted visitors, and the local businessmen suggested that Stoeber donate it to the town. The ball was put on display downtown, and in 1973, the Guinness Book of World Records awarded it the title of World’s Largest. A Wall Street Journal article about Kansas tourism that mocked the ball of twine only increased traffic to the town.
[Suspenseful music plays.] In 1978, however, one Francis Johnson of Darwin, MN contested Cawker City’s claim to fame. His ball of twine—allegedly begun in 1950 and continuously built for 29 years—was 13′ in diameter, 40′ in circumference, and weighed 17,400 lbs. In 1979, the Guinness Book of World Records dethroned the Kansas ball of twine and awarded the title to Francis Johnson’s sisal wunderball.
The Cawker City community rallied to the cause, and began a campaign of sisal wrapping—only sisal twine is permitted, no plastics, cotton, or other fibers—until, in 1994, their ball regained the title of World’s Largest Ball of Twine—albeit, one built by a community rather than by an individual.
By 2014, the ball had a diameter of just over 8′ and a circumference of 41′ 5”; it presently weighs 27,017 lbs., and it it still growing.
When you visit Cawker City and stop into the local café/tourist center, the staff will call Linda Clover, the current custodian of the ball. She’ll tell you the ball’s history and hand you the official spool of twine, so you can tie the loose end to an existing strand, circumnavigate the globe, and add to this historic achievement.
Dodge City
We got into Dodge. We got out of Dodge. I posted on Facebook that we were going to get out of Dodge, and Facebook’s AI decided that meant I had to plan an event for the occasion. The planet is going to fry so that Meta can burn vast amounts of fossil fuel in its goal of enabling AI to suggest that I plan a party to get out of Dodge.
As for Dodge City itself—there’s the touristy part, and outside of that, agribusiness. The tourist part was a nice stop.
Pizza Hut
Did you know the first Pizza Hut was opened in Witchita? Two brothers, Dan and Frank Carney—both recent graduates of Witchita State University, wanted to open a business. In 1958, they opened their first location after learning to make pizza from (if I remember the story right) a local and not Italian chef. Supposedly, they called the store “Pizza Hut” because they could only fit eight letters on their sign.
According to Dan Carney, opening night was “absolute chaos.”
Pizza Hut’s grand opening was delayed in part by some old bird’s nests. Like much of the equipment in the Carney brothers’ restaurant, the stove came secondhand and in disrepair. When the brothers fired up the oven, the nests inside caught fire, which meant the crew had to repaint the restaurant. The old roasting oven also didn’t generate enough heat to cook the pizzas, so Dan and Frank clipped the leads to the thermostat, drilled out bigger holes in the gas lines, and started the oven again. Finally the oven was hot enough to properly cook the pizza. It was also hot enough to melt its control knobs.
The ancient cash register didn’t have an amount key larger than $1, so the night was punctuated by the register ringing over and over when larger orders were placed. The oven had hot spots, so pizzas had to be moved constantly to keep them from burning. None of the ingredients were precooked. Frank recalled a tossed crust catching in the blades of a fan.
Within a year, there were six Pizza Hut locations. It began franchising in 1959, and one of their fraternity brothers designed the famous red roofed building in 1963. PepsiCo acquired the chain in 1977.
Next: Sulphur, OK.
The Badlands is an insane landscape of buttes and pinnacles in South Dakota. The formations are marked with bands of sediment and dramatically eroded by wind and rain. It was named the Badlands by French traders who called it “a bad land to travel.”
The National Park encompasses almost 380 square miles of land. It was authorized as a national monument in 1929 and subsequently designated as a national park in 1978.1 In addition to amazing stone formations—some of which reminded me of the cliffs and stupas of Mustang—the park contains bison, bighorn sheep, and rabies-carrying prairie dogs, among other critters. (Don’t try to pet the prairie dogs.)
From Little Bighorn, we went to Mount Rushmore. There’s a bunch of guys there.
Then there’s this guy: John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (1867-1941), the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Borglum was the son of Danish Mormon immigrants to the U.S. In addition to being a highly talented sculptor—he sculpted the statue of General Philip Sheridan that sits in Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC—he was also highly Ku Klux Klan-adjacent: if not an actual member of the Klan, which he claimed he was not, he nonetheless attended Klan rallies and sat on their committees. In fact, Borglum developed the techniques he used on Mount Rushmore by designing the Confederate monument Stone Mountain, although he left the project after disagreements with the Klan leaders who were backing the project before the work began. (The disagreements were over his perfectionism and authoritarianism on the site—and not, for example, because he was found to be insufficiently racist.1) The Klan Dragon D.C. Stephenson considered him “my good friend,” and their correspondence apparently detailed Borglum’s “deep racist conviction in Nordic moral superiority,” as one author describes it.
From Mount Rushmore, we went to the Crazy Horse Memorial. The sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, is his own story. An orphan and self-taught artist, Ziolkowski actually was an assistant to Borglum on the Mount Rushmore project. Wikipedia notes, “According to Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son, [Ziolkowski] was unhappy, having expected to be made the primary assistant. Instead, Lincoln was the primary assistant, and when Ziolkowski argued about his orders, Borglum fired him by telegram. A fistfight between Lincoln and Ziolkowski had to be broken up.”
Based on Ziolkowski’s other accomplishments and his knowledge of the area, several Lakota chiefs asked him to create a memorial to Crazy Horse. (Apparently, they first wrote to Borglum, but Borglum—unsurprisingly—never answered.) The plan was to create a monument that would dwarf Mount Rushmore. Ziolkowski accepted the project, and in 1948, after serving in WWII, he began the work of carving the mountain. Ziolkowski refused to take government funding, and he only accepted donations from visitors to the site. According to the documentary shown at the visitor’s center, Ziolkowski largely worked alone for years until his children (10 in all) were old enough to join him. While I find this hard to believe, there clearly wasn’t much money for tools or staff: the slow going of the project is evidence of that. Current estimates place the completion date sometime in 2120.
While the Crazy Horse Memorial is part of a larger development that includes an educational and cultural center, including the Indian University of North America, the project has its detractors. According to some Sioux voices, the memorial
is a violation of the same spirituality that Crazy Horse fought so valiantly to defend. Some even point out that Sioux land is held in common by the people and any approval to build the memorial should have been decided upon by the “collective” voice of the people as a whole – not by the few that hope to make money from a tourist attraction. Lame Deer, a noted Lakota Sioux medicine man has postulated “that the whole idea of making a beautiful wild mountain into a statue of him is a pollution of the landscape – it is against the spirit of Crazy Horse.”
Moreover, Crazy Horse was famously adverse to being photographed. “Those of the Sioux Nation opposed to the Crazy Horse Memorial argue that a man so contrary to having his image captured on film would never agree to have it sprawled across the face of a mountain, and his undisclosed burial site would seem to indicate the same.”
From Yellowstone, we went to Little Bighorn.
The genesis of the Battle of Little Bighorn was the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This was Sioux territory that white prospectors nonetheless were exploring in violation of the second Fort Laramie treaty. (Color me shocked.) The Grant administration tried to buy the land from the Sioux to give the prospectors free access; when the Sioux refused to sell it, the government ordered all Plains Indians onto reservations, or be declared “hostiles” who would be subject to removal. For multiple reasons, the various tribes were not going to comply with this.
The U.S. 7th Cavalry went in with 718 men, against a combined Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne force of perhaps 1,800 warriors. (Accounts vary; some historians say 1,000, some say as many as 5,000). Custer himself was led to believe the number was between 800 and 1,100. Worse, according to Wikipedia,
About 20% of the troopers had been enlisted in the prior seven months (139 of an enlisted roll of 718), were only marginally trained and had no combat or frontier experience. ,,, Archaeological evidence suggests that many of these troopers were malnourished and in poor physical condition, despite being the best-equipped and supplied regiment in the Army.
Apparently, the battle didn’t go very well for the U.S.
While the battle had been planned for June 26, when Custer would have moved his troops into position for according to the battle plan, the U.S. forces’ position was discovered a day early, which led Custer to attack immediately, to prevent the enemy from retreating. He split his regiment into three battalions. The first was beaten so badly that the second had to ride to its rescue, which left Custer and 210 men isolated on high ground, where they were annihilated. The other two battalions were defeated as well.
Naturally, while the Sioux and Cheyenne won the battle, they lost the war. As Britannica.com notes, “The outcome of the battle, though it proved to be the height of Indian power, so stunned and enraged white Americans that government troops flooded the area, forcing the Indians to surrender.”
Next: Faces.
This is the Artists’ Paintpots, a field of boiling pools and mudpots. Minerals in the mud give the paintpots their color.
Next is the Norris Geyser Basin, which the National Park Service says is “one of the hottest and most acidic of Yellowstone’s hydrothermal areas.” It has lots of vents and small pools. Should you visit—well, this would be a good time to remind you of the warnings posted around the park.
Next is Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces. The area is notable for its travertine terraces—terraces formed by limestone deposited around flowing fresh water mineral springs.
Finally, the Dragon Mouth Spring.
