Author Archives: Chandler O'Leary

Cave paintings

Well, I might not have had the chance to tour Meramec Caverns, but I got to tour the everloving snot out of Carlsbad Caverns—and I have the bursting sketchbook to prove it.

We were there in the “wrong” season—that is, not the time of year for bat-watching. But it didn’t matter: I figured the cave itself would be plenty enough to keep my pen busy.

Boy howdy, was that an understatement. I forgot all about the steep hike as soon as we got underground, because my brain immediately broke. At least, the part of my brain used to drawing recognizable things broke. The under-used bit that loves abstraction came roaring to life. It was like a Seussian paradise down there.

I think anyone wanting to teach design should send their students to Carlsbad Caverns. Around every curve waits a lesson in composition, or silhouette, or texture, or complex linework, or negative space.

Of course, it’s far too dark in the cave to break out the old watercolors, so I had to do that part later, but I had no problem making drawing after quick drawing on the spot, while the friendly park ranger told us interesting stories (have I mentioned that I love park rangers?)

And the limestone formations lent themselves so well to drawing! The way water carved each stalactite into linear shapes, or formed ripples in the surface of rock—it was like reinterpreting a line drawing that already existed in three dimensions.

Of course, none of this drawing (nor any of the dramatic photographs you see of the place) would be possible without the work the National Park Service did to show the caverns in their best light—quite literally! Almost as much as the rock formations themselves, what really struck me was how incredible the lighting work is in there, and how the mechanics of it all are nearly invisible. Without such brilliant lighting design, each spectacular formation would be lost in a sea of overwhelming texture. The park goes way beyond any museum, and ventures into the realm of art: if nature is already perfect on its own here, it takes a masterpiece of illumination to make humans appreciate it all.

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Farm to marketing

This post is part of an ongoing series called 66 Fridays, which explores the wonders of old Route 66. Click on the preceding “66 Fridays” link to view all posts in the series, or visit the initial overview post here.

One of the most well-known—and most-hyped—tourist traps along Route 66 are the Meramec Caverns. Whether or not the caves actually live up to the hype is not something I can weigh in on, I’m afraid: by the time we got there, they’d closed for the evening. But that’s okay—while I’m always up for a good tourist trap (neon signs inside the caves!), and I’d love to see the place that was allegedly the hideout of Jesse James, what really interests me most is the hype itself. And on our trip I didn’t have to worry about missing out on that.

When it comes to advertising, Meramec Caverns seems to have taken a leaf from the playbook of Wall Drug, which opened just two years before the Caverns transitioned from local curiosity to tourist entertainment complex. Wall Drug had enormous success with advertising to travelers by way of hundreds of inexpensive, hand-painted wooden billboards placed in farm fields all over the northern Plains. Les Dill, the owner of the Caverns, offered farmers in 14 states a free paint job on their barns—as long as they were willing for the design to include a giant Meramec Caverns ad on whatever wall or roof panel faced the road. By the 1960s there were hundreds of Meramec barns in 40 different states, all beckoning travelers to the Ozarks.

Oh, and you might also be interested to know that Dill was also one of the earliest adopters of the humble bumper sticker, cottoning onto the idea of cars as mobile billboards. Now, I still don’t think there’s a more elegant bumper sticker than “Where the heck is Wall Drug?” but Meramec Caverns had the idea first.

There are still a handful of Meramec barns around today, and some of the best (and most lovingly maintained) are along the Mother Road. They vary in design, and some—like the one above—look a bit like some sort of cryptic code for those in the know.

Well, thanks to Dill’s ingenious marketing strategy, I am in the know now—and you can bet I’ll return one day, following the signs back to the Caverns, barn by barn.

Ted’s tasty freeze

Our first day on Route 66 was bookended with pit stops at iconic Mother Road road-food joints. We had our early-morning breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s just after sunrise, but by the time we reached St. Louis in the late afternoon, it was so hot and muggy that we were dying for a break to cool off. Enter Ted Drewes, to the rescue.

Ted’s recipe for frozen custard has been an icon since 1926, and the location on Chippewa Street has been a Route 66 fixture since it opened in 1941. There were plenty of treats to choose from, but we went with their classic mainstay, the Concrete. To anyone who has visited a Dairy Queen in the last thirty years, a Concrete will look just like ye olde familiar Blizzard. The Blizzard, too, was invented in St. Louis—but Dairy Queen will be the first to admit that the inspiration was Ted Drewes’s concoction, which predated the Blizzard by nearly thirty years.

I went with the fairly standard cookie dough flavor for mine, but the Tailor just about died of happiness when he saw they offered one made with pie cherries (his favorite, and an increasingly rare commodity—that’s a story for another day). We still had another eighty miles of road ahead of us that day, but we were refreshed and ready: nothing prepares you for pounding the pavement like a little scoop of Concrete.

Arch-etype

Well, there are natural arches, and there are the man-made variety. Somehow, they both seem to attract my attention equally. In any case, you can bet that any arch that dominates the skyline as completely as the Gateway Arch does is going to be a star player in my sketchbook, any day.

Frozen desert

In my humble opinion, the absolute best time to visit Arches is in the winter. Sure, you’ll have to wrap up extra warm (it barely got above zero degrees F during the day!), and if you’re sketching, you’ll have to think ahead to keep your paints from freezing. But the rewards far outweigh any annoyances. For one thing, there’s nothing like seeing Arches under a blanket of snow. For another, the teeming hordes that descend upon the place during the peak season are simply nonexistent. So you’re far more likely to have the same luck the Tailor and I did, when we had this…

…all to ourselves.

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The first stop

If you’re going to start Route 66 in Chicago, start your trip right with a meal at Lou Mitchell’s diner. Nicknamed the “first stop on the Mother Road,” I can’t think of a better place to break your fast or mark the beginning of a journey. Also, since the place opens at 5:30 on weekday mornings, you don’t have to derail your whole day with a stop here. (Tangent! One of my few complaints about living on the West Coast is that nothing opens early. A huge thing I miss about Midwestern living is being able to run errands and go out to eat at the crack of dawn!)

And if you go, you best come hungry. Not only are the plates enormous (double-yolk eggs!), but even the simplest breakfasts turn out to be five-course meals there. Leave room for the doughnut holes, is all I’m saying.

Now, the food and history are reason enough to eat at Lou Mitchell’s. But the icing on the proverbial cake, for me, was the lettering. Hoo boy, there is more gorgeous, vintage, hand-painted sign lettering in there than can be found in some entire cities. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

All I can say is thank goodness this place is still here, still largely untouched. It seemed like a good omen for embarking on an Americana pilgrimage. Long live Route 66, long live Lou Mitchell’s.

Sunset sentinel

When Mary-Alice and I drove across Texas together last year, we knew our stop for this night would be somewhere around Houston. Neither of us fancied slogging through an enormous, unfamiliar city at rush hour, so from the passenger seat I pulled out the map to see if I couldn’t find an alternative. What I found was a lonely road that hugged the Gulf coast, then ended in a ferry to Galveston. Sold. (Also, as it turned out, best idea ever. That road was gorgeous!) Since we made the decision on the fly, I had no idea what we might find en route. So rounding a curve to encouter a 180-foot lighthouse looming suddenly above us in the purple dusk was not just an arresting sight—it was unforgettable.

From a certain angle

Lime Kiln Point is one of Washington’s best state parks. For one thing, it’s on my favorite island (and since I love all of Washington’s islands with a mad passion, that’s saying something). For another, it’s got a great lighthouse—which is something for which I’ll always come running. Best of all, if you happen to be there at the right time of year, or are just insanely lucky, you’ll be treated to an extra surprise. Don’t see what I mean? Look again, closely, at the sketch, and you’ll get what I’m angling at…

Eastern terminus

To help you keep your bearings in this 66 Fridays series, and to provide an overview of the route, the first few posts will go in geographical order. So let’s start at the very beginning, at the eastern terminus of the route.

American highways, in general, are measured from south to north, and from west to east. So in general, the “start” of any highway is technically its southern- or westernmost point, and the milemarkers count from there. But for our Route 66 trip we went from east to west. That’s because for that highway, at least, most travelers (from Dust Bowl migrants to pleasure cruisers) seemed to head that direction. All the Route 66 lore, from songs to stories, seems to be oriented that way, too. And besides, America is steeped in the tradition of heading West—to me, the East still feels like a beginning, and the West a promise of what lies ahead.

So that put the beginning of our journey at the beginning of the route: in downtown Chicago.

Route 66’s path through Chicago has changed somewhat over the years, but that’s a longer story than necessary for this post. To make things simpler, most travelers and historians count Michigan Avenue, between Adams and Jackson, as the eastern terminus of the Mother Road. (Adams is a one-way heading west, and Jackson is the same eastbound, hence the two intersections.) And there are no better guardians of the route than the bronze lions prowling in front of the Art Institute.

It’s even more fitting when you consider that the Art Institute was originally part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. A sort of World’s Fair, the Exposition marked 400 years since Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, and celebrated the rebirth of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. Most of the buildings erected for the Exposition were designed to be temporary, but the Art Institute was intended to occupy what was the World Congress Auxiliary Building at the fair, so that structure was made permanent.

Oh, and incidentally, the Art Institute of Chicago was originally called the Chicago Academy of Design, which was founded in 1866. Its address before the Great Chicago Fire? 66 West Adams Street.

Somehow, then, it seems pretty perfect that an old WCE building, originally designed to promote westward exploration and new beginnings at the fair, marks the beginning of America’s best-known westward highway.

Mother Road, mother lode

Last summer the Tailor and I spent a couple of weeks traveling every inch of old Route 66. And then I kept pretty quiet about it, because I just had no idea how to organize and share the sheer number of sketches and stories I came away with afterward. There really is no “long story short” way to do this—like the Mother Road itself, there are too many branches and tangents for a single linear tale. So like I did for my Mission Mondays series, I’m going to break this down into 66 Fridays, starting today and running through spring of next year. (You can follow along by using the 66 Fridays tag.)

So each week for the next 66 weeks, I’m going to share a piece of Route 66—and like everything else on this blog (except the Mission series), those pieces will be in no particular order. There are a zillion books out there already that tell the Route 66 story from beginning to end (both in time and space), so that frees me to, er, paint a slightly different picture. I’ll be jumping around from state to state, highlighting my favorite landmarks and historical tidbits. With any luck, it’ll give you a good enough taste of the Mother Road that it’ll inspire you to explore it for yourself.

A few notes:

• There’s a common perception that Route 66 is long gone, and that modern travelers can only drive bits of the route. That’s actually not true. While modern Interstate highways have replaced long chunks of the Mother Road in certain spots, it’s actually possible to drive over 80 percent of the original route—including the original road bed and even 90-year-old pavement in several places. Route 66 was officially decommissioned as a U.S. highway decades ago, but the old thread is still there, still nearly intact, just waiting for an adventurous traveler with a sharp eye to find it.

• We didn’t see everything there is to see on Route 66. Not even close. We spent nearly two weeks on the Mother Road, and by my estimate we would have needed a good month, at least, to really take it all in. Considering how much more there would have been to see years ago, before so many places closed down or fell into ruin, it all boggles my mind a bit. Nevertheless, this trip was a good first taste of the whole thing. I made the Tailor promise me that someday we’d do it all again, and take however much time we wanted.

• Even though we didn’t see everything along the way, we did our darndest to drive every inch of the route that remains—and that’s no small feat, considering how many tributaries, diversions, parallel routes, rerouted sections, poorly-marked bits and dead ends there are. I’d driven bits of 66 before, but never the whole stretch in one go. It feels like a real accomplishment that we did that.

• I hope you don’t hate vintage signs, because you can expect a lot of them in the coming months. I’ll try to keep the posts balanced between various subject matters, but I’m not gonna lie: there’s a metric ton of incredible vintage signage along Route 66, and I did my level best to draw all of it. I have whole sketchbooks just devoted to neon. I probably won’t show you everything, but you will see an awful lot of it.

So buckle your seatbelts and pull out your paper maps—let’s get this show on the road, and embark upon the serious business of getting our kicks.

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