July 23rd, 2008 · Comments Off
Note: This is the sequel to yesterday’s post, The DrHGuy Alternative Southwest Missouri Tour - Part I. After reading the account by fellow blogger and McHenry County co-inhabitant, Cal Skinner, of his family’s vacation in Southwest Missouri, the region where I spent my childhood and adolescence, I was moved to proffer my observations on some glaring omissions from the Skinner family itinerary. Yesterday’s Heck of a Guy discourse featured historical and spiritual sites - The George Washington Carver Monument and The Spooklight, respectively. Today, however, the focus is on the primo attraction overlooked by Cal’s clan: my Mom’s collection of - well, collectibles.
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If She Finds Out, This Will Break My Mother’s Heart
Missing the George Washington Carver Monument and The Spooklight, inexplicable as those omissions may seem, is nonetheless small potatoes compared to Cal’s failure to pay a call on my mother, who lives within an hour of Branson in the real Ozarks. As I’ve previously noted in this blog,
I grew up in, and, more pertinently, my mother still lives in the Ozarks, where the only gated communities are inhabited exclusively by cattle, and upper-class is spelled “d-o-u-b-l-e-w-i-d-e.” In these parts, the citizenry is allied in the conviction that the guy who wants his neighbors to cease using their lawns as sites for burning is at best an uppity snob and may well be a proponent of socialism, communism, or even vegetarianism. That he is seeking to ban the burning of tires, not leaves, cuts no mustard (or, alternatively, makes no nevermind). There is also a consensus that the other political radical, the one who proposes zoning regulations that would, for example, limit clotheslines to a length of 30 feet and restrict them from front yards, should either keep his nose out of others folks’ business or find happiness elsewhere. … And, the scenery … is striking with rugged hills setting off man-made Table Rock Lake. The view in the photo below is from the deck of my mother’s home.
It is, one supposes, theoretically possible that Cal didn’t realize that instead of fighting the Branson traffic to reach the Hollywood Wax Museum, the Waltzing Waters Theatre, and the numerous miniature golf, go-kart, and bump’em car establishments that are the warp and woof of that municipality’s cultural milieu, he could have jogged south a bit and navigated his way, en route to Mom’s cabin on Turkey Mountain Road, through and past Roaring River Road, Trout Street, Song Bird Drive, Whippoorwill Drive, Dove Lane, and still other byways named after local critters such as Smallmouth Bass, Largemouth Bass, Quail, and Mockingbird …
Mom’s home on Table Rock Lake
to finally experience the thrill of arriving, less than 1/2 mile from Mom’s, at the corner of Sonny & Cher Avenues.
But instead, Cal took his family to see one Righteous Brother and Paul Revere and the Raiders perform with Andy Williams, Ann Margaret and her husband Roger Smith in the audience. I bet someone feels pretty foolish now.
The Tour’s Epicenter
It will come as no surprise to those familiar with this blog that the highlight of the DrHGuy Alternative Southwest Missouri Tour is the exhibit described in this excerpt from In My Mother’s House Are Many Tchotchkes:
For you fans of geosociological phenomena, my mother’s home is officially recognized as the site of the nexus of Ozark kitsch and that principle of Newtonian physics that declares “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Every horizontal space and a significant percentage of the vertical planes are packed with multiple layers of magazines, books, toys, food, plants, ceramics, linens, doodads, gadgets, widgets, and on and on – and on and on and on and on … .
One consequence of this accumulating mass is that my parents’ retirement cabin has achieved a profound, astronomical scale density, which, at the current rate of increase, will, sometime in June or July 2019, result in the transformation of the southwest corner of the basement into what is anticipated to be the first documented home-grown specimen of antimatter.
… my mother’s decorating scheme … is variously labeled as The Glass Is 110% Full, More Is More, or Nothing Succeeds Like Excess.
The walls are sufficiently weighted with displays of 35-45 meat grinders (a small portion pictured below), angels, awls, & augers; and so incredibly much more that I suspect they could withstand tornado-force winds. … Nor are the fine arts ignored. Saw-blade paintings (i.e., paintings on saw-blades, not paintings of saw blades) abound.
My mother also owns beaucoup boxes of buttons; coping saws, two-man saws, & see-saws; bolts of material with the John Deere logo (three versions); cabinets full of miniature oil lamps; more cabinets filled with shaving gear, including a display of straight razors; and … well, you get the idea.
It’s one of those “you have to see it to believe it” sort of things.
And, thank goodness, one can see - and believe. Photos of some of the items Mom has mounted on her walls can be viewed at
I’ve included some examples here to give a flavor of the entire collection.
Wall filled with tools and implements
Closeup of wall shown in preceding graphic
Razors (click on graphic to view larger image)
Bee Smokers (click on graphic to view larger image)
Carved Swans (click on graphic to view larger image)
And even within special collections there are very special items - such as My Mother’s Incredibly Christian Clock.
Excerpt:
As pictured above, the piece consists of a round clock face, perhaps three inches in diameter, flanked by kneeling prepubescent figures: a girl on the right and a boy on the left, each with hands clasped in fervent prayer, and each wearing pastel blue facsimiles of school uniforms, a pinafore for the young lady and shirt & short pants for the young gentleman.
… The outstanding feature of this item, however, is its audio capacity. My introduction to this treasured appliance, in fact, was its annunciation, launched without provocation or prior warning at precisely 6 PM, Thanksgiving Day, of “Our Father, which art in heaven, … ” or, more accurately, “OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN, … ,” and then going on to recite the entire Lord’s Prayer in the resonant, fortissimo voice of an stupefyingly strident, incessantly insistent, and perpetually perky teenage girl.
As we were to discover, in fact, The Clock declaims the Pater Noster at exactly 6 & 7 AM and again at 6 &7 PM - every damn blessed day. Curious about the rationale underlying the unusual 6 AM - 7 AM – 6 PM - 7 PM schedule, I queried the curator (AKA Mom). Displaying incredulity that the news hadn’t already reached the Greater Chicagoland Area, she informed me that this model was advertised to commence the familiar prayer only at 6 AM and 6 PM, but, she went on to explain with evident pride and gratitude, the specimen that found its way to her living room also holds forth at 7 AM and 7 PM as well – a happenstance that she clearly accounts a bonus and that she implies falls only a step below raising the dead and healing the sick in the hierarchy of miracles.
Internet Endorsement Of Mom’s Stuff
While the wonder of Mom’s collectibles seems unmistakably obvious to me, it is, in theory, not impossible that my judgment is swayed by a maternally-directed bias. That friends, neighbors, and other family members have all reacted in the same manner to Mom’s wall mounted displays is supportive but ultimately anecdotal evidence.
Happily, I can offer a statistical indicator. As I originally noted in Maternal Tchotchke Inventory Hits The Charts, on a single day in October of last year, 2,000 folks tuned in just to see what Mom had wrought.
Viewers might note the blip in number of visits on October 18, 2007 - especially since I’ve circled it in red and labeled it with the date. The graph shows that each day of the period from September 20 to October 20, 2007, the Heck of a Guy blog received just under 1,000 visits with the exception of October 18th, when the site registered over 3,000 visits.
A few investigative clicks deeper into Google Analytics revealed that this past Thursday about 2,000 different folks
dropped by 1heckofaguy.com to take a look at the
Gallery Of My Mother’s Inventory.
It was not a coincidence that those 2,000 visitors happened onto the photos of Mom’s rustic tchotchkes on the same day with another 500 stragglers showing up to gawk the next day. Again delving into Google Analytics, I discovered that, while at least 16 sites accounted for the referrals to
Gallery Of My Mother’s Inventory, the original and primary source was
StumbleUpon, a web site recommendation system based on social networking and peer review.
In oversimplified form, folks belonging to StumbleUpon rate and recommend web pages that their fellow members may enjoy. One finds potentially interesting sites by looking in StumbleUpon categories such as “collecting” or by finding members with tastes similar to ones own and checking the web pages they rank highly.
… I also checked the comments from the viewers, albeit with some trepidation. Although StumbleUpon is, in my experience, less given to harsh, scathing critiques than, say, Digg or Technorati, traffic of this sort can nonetheless be generated by a site being described, in effect, as “so incredibly, unbelievably, excessively screwed-up that you must see it.” Happily, the comments on the half-dozen or so sites I sampled were overwhelmingly complimentary with the most derogatory notation simply referring to a certain tendency toward pack-rattedness my mother exhibits, which neither she or I would bother to deny.
The Best of the Rest
Southwest Missouri, in fact, is home to an overwhelming number of attractions, including CYOKAMO, the church camp I attended every summer and the source of the best Christian Camp Song ever written by a nine-fingered gospel preacher, Missouri Southern College, the alma mater of DrHGuy and Dennis Weaver, and the Springfield, Missouri home of Julie’s mother, who is a wonderful person although she doesn’t have a single meat grinder or two-man saw mounted on her walls.
So there you have it. This ends DrHGuy’s Southwest Missouri Tour and Travel Tips. I hope it’s been entertaining and even a tad - aargh - informative.
Y’all come back real soon.
Footnotes
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Tags: Fascinations
July 22nd, 2008 · Comments Off
Livin’ ain’t easy, Bloggin’s twice as tough
The Vulnerable Soul Of The Blogger
One can blog ones little heart out to bring what Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light” to the public, asking for no other gratification than occasionally imbuing the reader with a bit of wisdom to enhance that individual’s life, only to have that vision shattered by those near and dear to him.
And, no, I’m not referring to the tragedy of discovering last month that my closest friends did not know, despite the multiple Heck of a Guy posts broadcasting the fact, that Leonard Cohen wrote “Hallelujah.” That episode is past; I have found that one can indeed love the sinner while hating the sin.
No, this desecration of the dream came to light this past weekend as I was catching up on the past month’s missed reading of the blogs I follow. In this process, I noticed that fellow McHenry County inhabitant and blogger, Cal Skinner of McHenryCountyBlog, had posted a description of his family’s vacation in and around my old stomping ground, southwest Missouri.
Given that I’ve written volumes about the wonders of this area, I was eager to read the Skinner family’s take on those sights.
I’ve excerpted the pertinent portions of Cal’s entry, Back From Vacation, below:
If you have noticed a dearth of local, breaking news since Independence Day, it was because our family was in Missouri on vacation. … We stayed at Joplin’s Hotel Desmond, much more than a bread and breakfast, because my gracious little sister and my brother-in-law run it.
We were treated to a Grand Lake, Oklahoma, 4th of July Saturday. … The rest of the day was spent in an undeveloped cove of this 66 mile long man-made lake. … My son was enchanted by the Undercliff Bar and Grill south of Joplin. We went twice. It had a toy scoop money grabber that guaranteed a prize, even if it was a piece of penny candy. He eventually got the bracelet he wanted. … We went to the Dickerson Zoo in Springfield, up I-44 from Joplin. The highlight (pun intended) was seeing folks feed the giraffes from a raised platform. The same day we visited the Fantastic Caverns. The latter were fantastic because one does not have to walk. We guys … went to see Big Brutus in southeast Kansas coal strip mine country.
Big Brutus is the second largest drag line in the country. It has been preserved and folks can climb to the cab. … we went together to the Precious Moments Chapel. I have to admit not wanting to go the first time around back in the early 1990’s. I thought the Precious Moments statuettes were “terminally cute.” The figurines still are, but the Chapel is worth the trip. … Next, the two sisters decided it was time to visit Branson, which is about as far south in Missouri as Joplin, but without a direct west-east connection. … Sunday we ate at Andy Williams’ Moon River Cafe. He was out playing golf, the bartender told us as he was serving our meal at the almost empty restaurant. That night, I enjoyed the joint show of Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus Bill Medley, the remaining and deep-voiced Righteous Brother. … And, who was in the audience? Andy Williams, Ann Margaret and her husband Roger Smith. They were sitting way up top, but I didn’t bring my camera. …
The Response
Heck of a Guy readers are no doubt appalled by this account - and not just because, in defiance of his own advice, Cal didn’t have his camera handy and thus forfeited his chance to play paparazzo to the Branson jet set.
No, the true horror arises from the realization of opportunities lost.
While I do not criticize those sites the Skinner family did visit, I cannot but lament that the most important local attractions were missing from their itinerary.
Let’s start with the absence of …
The Obligatory Parent-initiated Vacation Forced March To An Historically Or Culturally Significant Location (OPVFMTAHOCSL)
As it turns out, one can’t swing any sort of cat - deceased, live, or suspended in status Schrodinger - in the vicinity of southwest Missouri without hitting a Historically Or Culturally Significant Location (HOCSLs): a live feline, for example, placed in the prescribed centrifugal, arms length orbit could be clawing at civil war battlefields, archaeological digs, museums, mineral displays, or all manner of civic festivals. Heck, the whirling cat himself could well become the nidus of a festival.
But, of course, the obvious choice from this category would have been Diamond, Missouri (AKA The Gem City of the Ozarks), less than a 30 minute drive from Joplin and the birthplace of George Washington Carver, who was featured in six Heck of a Guy posts, and DrHGuy. There is, in fact, already a national monument located at the farm where George was born.
George Washington Carver National Monument near Diamond, Missouri
Scenes from the George Washington Carver Monument
DrHGuy’s earliest home is, alas, not available for viewing because of its current role as - and I kid you not - a shed.
DrHGuy is far too modest to point out that the Skinner clan could, without leaving the city limits of Joplin, have made the pilgrimage to the McDonald’s where a young DrHGuy learned the ways of commerce, starting as a humble and lovable bun boy, then moving up to condiment dispenser, and finally rising to the position of shift floor manager. It was, in fact, that selfsame DrHGuy, who compiled, with his own hands (carefully washed as per the McDonald’s instructional video) two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun into the first Big Mac sold in Joplin.
Dramatization of first Big Mac sold in Joplin, Missouri. DrHGuy, creator.
Not that DrHGuy’s feeling are hurt or anything.
The Spiritual Venue
The Skinners did visit the Precious Moments Chapel, which technically qualifies as a spiritual site although its only mention in a Heck of a Guy post was as part of a threat in an extortion scheme.
Regardless, The primal preternatural locus of the area is clearly the Spooklight, the apparition described in this excerpt from Spooklight Story?
The Spooklight has appeared here since the 1860s, typically taking the form of a bright light (sometimes described as a “ball of fire”) of a yellow-orange color, ranging in size from what one might guess would be a large flashlight to something the size of a bushel basket or larger, that seems to be at the top of the next rise. The light routinely moves to the left and right. Less often, it’s said to split into smaller balls of light or take on different colors (red, blue, and green). Those walking toward the light find that it disappears until, if they continue forward, it reappears behind them.
The Spooklight offers, in short, the consummate religious experience:
the opportunity to scare the bejesus out of all involved
The Spooklight, near Hornet, Missouri
And, this reliably occurring miracle was certainly close by.
Spooklight Road is eleven miles southwest of Joplin, Missouri, just past the village of Hornet, in the area where Missouri borders Oklahoma and Kansas. The light is most commonly described as being visible from inside the Oklahoma border looking to the west.
Yet (cue ominous music) no Spooklight expedition was mounted by the Skinner Party.
Tomorrow:
Part II of The DrHGuy Alternative Southwest Missouri Tour
AKA, If She Finds Out, This Will Break My Mother’s Heart
Footnotes
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Tags: Fascinations
December 17th, 2007 · Comments Off
Items From Other Rooms Now On-line
Churns, China, Figurines, Miniature Bottles
Photos of another group of those doodads, antiques, gadgets, widgets, junk, tchotchkes, collectibles, oddities, curios, odds, ends, and much, much more that fill my mother’s home are now available for viewing.
A more accurate but also more awkward title for this category would be “Items From Areas Of Mom's Home Other Than The Rooms Listed In The Other Family Home Photo Safari Posts.” These are items located in the hallways, stairwells, bathrooms, the guest bedroom, etc of Mom's home.
I’m especially fond of the glass jar butter churns, one of the few nostalgic collectibles I distinctly remember being employed in my childhood home. I have no memory, for example, of oil lamps, two man saws, ice tongs, or even the dash butter churns being used.
One photo, I see now, requires further explanation. While many items are, obviously, displayed as parts of a collection, some pieces aren’t formally displayed but have been accumulated in quantities far beyond the level that would be routinely needed for utility’s sake. To provide a sense of this phenomenon, I have included a photo of the blankets and quilts Mom keeps stacked in the guest bedroom - other than the covers already on the bed. Ostensibly, these are made available in case the temperature drops precipitously during the night. Given that I have visited my parents’ home as an adult many, many times during the winter without needing that extra dozen quilts, I think it fair to consider these quilts one of her “hidden collections.”
Mom’s Collectibles - Index & Description Page
The full story of my mother’s houseful of collectibles and its metaphysical implications and links to all published photos of items from her home can be found at Mom’s Collectibles - Index & Description Page
The Photos
All of the Family Home Photo Safari pictures were taken by me during our Thanksgiving 2007 trip to Mom's home. The vistas on the title panels of the photo displays depict Table Rock Lake as seen from the cabin’s deck during the same Thanksgiving 2007 visit.
I hope you enjoy viewing these photos as much as I enjoyed photographing my parents’ collectibles and as much as my mother and father enjoyed finding and displaying them.
The photos of the items found in hallways, stairways, and transitional areas are available at Mom's Other Room.
Coming Attractions: Photos of the final room of Mom's collectibles, those from the Living Room, should be posted later this week.
Footnotes
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