Fri., August 11: Unreal History

Somewhere appropriately close to Pompeii, Michigan, disaster nearly struck. As mentioned way earlier, I typically drive about seven miles above the speed limit on interstates, and have never had a problem with the police. Thus was my cruise control set this morning as I passed a state trooper in the median while in the left lane. I don’t know what prompted this, but I glanced in the rearview and was disturbed to see him pulling out. Other vehicles were visible, so I did not panic as I got clear of the slower traffic and moved back to the right lane. Nor did I panic, but I was rather nonplussed, when he pulled behind me, lights flashing. A regular event for some, especially those with dark skin1 The sports editor and thus professor at the newspaper my journalism school ran, former editor of a well-known sports magazine, drove a late-model Saab. He followed the same careful driving rules I did, I knew from conversation and following or riding with him. But he was pulled an average of once a month. , for me one hand is sufficient to count the number of times I’ve been pulled in nearly 50 years of driving. The first was at 16, when I learned not to drive ten miles over the speed limit.

I assumed the position, one hand on the wheel, the other on the passenger headrest. He approached the far window, which was open, leaned in and greeted. A young male EA, he was friendly, starting with general politesse. He then asked if I knew why he’d stopped me; I did not. “Because of that ballet shoe blocking your view,” he explained.

You’ll be needing a word of explanation. At N.C. School of the Arts in my day, it became fashionable for backstage-worker paramours of ballerinas to be gifted pink toe shoes, usually used-up. These then were hung prominently from one’s rearview mirror.

Now, I was not yet successful in bedding a ballerina, but had many friends of that ilk, one of whom provided a pair to me and a friend. For those who feel I cheated, I concur, but I later corrected the situation. My friend, a dancer himself, was dating a ballerina. One day while we were driving somewhere in his very old BMW, she began playing with his new shoe hanging off the mirror. She realized it was her size, and already broken in. As breaking in toe shoes is a painful experience, she offered a trade for a brand-new pair of hers. Thus his shoe now met the criteria.

Five years later, I dated her a while, so the same became true of mine. That ballet shoe, or a later replacement from a young friend2 The ribbons of the first sun-rotted. It now has a place of honor on my curio shelves. , has hung in a dozen cars since.

As you likely know, a toe shoe is tiny. I wanted to say, “Are you kidding? Anything small enough to be blocked by this could not possibly cause a wreck. And do you know how many decades, in how many states, I have driven with a toe shoe hanging from my mirror without incident?”

Instead I reached to begin untying it and asked, “Oh, is that illegal in Michigan?” He only asked for my license and insurance, not my registration, instead asking if the car was registered in my name. I told him the insurance was in the glove box, opened it slowly, and paused a second to give him a view inside before pulling out the envelope I keep my paperwork in. It took a moment to find the insurance card, while I reassured him it was in there, and he reassured me the The offending toe shoe delay was okay.

While he was doing his thing in the cruiser, I untied a ten-year-old knot with some difficulty and put the shoe in the back seat. When he returned, he inquired—more, I sensed, in a stranger-at-a-bar way than for professional reasons—where I was headed. I summarized the trip, and he said he was jealous. After a moment’s friendly exchange on the topic, he wished me a good day and left. “Sorry for the trouble,” I called after him.

I’m not sure why. But I was thinking about what was in the back hatch, hinted at earlier. In Washington, I’d procured a bottle of marijuana tincture and jar of grass-aided pain ointment. Possessing small amounts for personal use are legal there and in Michigan. Transporting them across multiple state lines, however, is very much against federal law.

Each person I’ve told this story to has shared my incredulity as to this reason for getting pulled. As I continued through Michigan, I saw that most rearviews were indeed bare, but some minor hangings appeared. One listener suggested maybe the trooper was fresh out of the academy, trying to prove himself; another brought up my out-of-state license plate. It didn’t take me long to arrive at an alternative scenario. The sun’s morning angle on a southward drive had forced me to shift the sunshade to the side, but in my car that often is insufficient; I also must wear a ball cap sideways. After following me one time, nephew Marty said I look like a teenager driving that way. I also usually wear long sleeves on long drives as sun protection. What this white guy saw was a beater car with tinted windows and a guy of indeterminate skin color wearing his hat in an urban way.

As noted back in Jackson, Mike Johnson came to visit me at the end of this month. He about fell out of his chair laughing when I told him, “I think that after forty years of driving, I finally got pulled for driving while black!”

The day’s first stop was another capitol. Downtown Lansing was shockingly quiet on a Friday morning, which suggests when the legislature is out of session, so is downtown. I parked directly across the street from the glass-doored visitor entrance to the building. Once inside, I was surprised to be handed an 8-1/2˝ by 11˝ magazine-like booklet, Welcome to Michigan’s National Historic Landmark.

The title is inexplicable. Michigan has dozens of national historic landmarks. Maybe this is the only one owned by Michigan. I didn’t ask. “Very impressive,” I told the receptionist. “I’ve been to a lot of capitols, and this is unusual.” She thanked me, saying they try to do things right.

The early history of Michigan capitols raises questions about that statement. When Michigan became its own territory in 1805—carved out of the Indiana Territory—Detroit was selected as the capital city. When territory turned to state in 1937, the territorial capitol became the state’s first. But the state constitution set a ten-year deadline for moving to another location.

As in every large organization in history, the legislators waited till way later than they should have. With only nine months to go, they settled on a barely populated spot more toward the middle of the Mitten. One detractor described it as a “‘howling wilderness.’” A new wooden capitol was thrown up that winter to meet the constitutional deadline. The village that coalesced around it didn’t even have a name. (“Michigan,” as in, “Michigan, Michigan,” didn’t take for obvious reasons, so they adopted Lansing from the larger “township,” sort of like a county.) The interim building housed the government for more than 50 years, until this grandiose yet attractive pile opened in 1879.

Some of this I picked up in the unusually extensive exhibits, as capitol exhibits go. In one side room one of the original legislative desks was on display, which brought back a cool memory. My great uncle, Herschel V. Johnson, was the U.S. ambassador to Brazil for five years around 1950. In the basement of that nation’s capitol, Brasilia, I enjoyed seeing the old national congressional desks arranged in arcing rows from the days when he was ambassador.3 He would have seen them in the old capital city of Rio de Janiero , though.

The techie in me paused in the basement of the building proper. Cast iron ribs and columns support the glass floor tiles of the rotunda, a few of them original. After examining the advanced construction techniques of the 1870s, I was excited to see the result above. Yet again, reconstruction raised its disappointing head, this time in progress. Michigan supposedly has one of the more attractive capitol rotundas, but I cannot attest, because it was closed off. When I stepped through the construction door for a look anyway, scaffolding blocked the view.

The interior I could see elsewhere is ornate, some might say over the top, with well-maintained original elements. I especially liked the metal alloy chandeliers, originally gas-lit, with detailed elk statuettes. They looked bronze to me. The guidebook said they were presumed to be copper, but testing revealed them as some unspecified alloy.

Walking around the effectively blacked-out rotunda on the second floor, I had an odd moment of recognition. In a small vestibule was a locked door with a sign by it reading, “Governor, Gretchen Whitmer.” This tickled my memory, but it took a moment to realize why. I was experiencing history that might have been. There is no term in English for this. I double-checked. “Alternative history” comes closest, a fictional genre about what might have been. In this case, I am referring to something someone wanted to happen and tried to make happen, but didn’t. Except, I had my facts slightly wrong.

In 2020, a dozen men were picked up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges they planned to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. They were mad about the restrictions the state imposed during the covid pandemic. Nine were eventually convicted. As I stood there, and the meaning of the name sunk in, I thought I was standing in the spot those men had hoped to reach. It was a feeling I have never exactly felt before. However, in checking my facts just now, it turns out they were actually aiming for her vacation home. Still, it was a fun moment.

Old Supreme Court Chamber The main doors to the legislative houses were open. In the House I and a couple of staffers were mutually surprised to see each other, one of whom recovered to say hello, which I returned. Upstairs in the gallery, I got a better look at the recessed skylight panes bearing the coats of arms of the 50 states. I spotted New Mexico and North Carolina, but didn’t feel compelled to ferret out the other four I’ve lived in.4 In addition to the two we’ve visited, Florida (where I was born and returned after college) and New York (in the City once and Rochester area twice).

Always alert to suspicious superlatives, I would have been skeptical of a sign that claimed the old state Supreme Court Chamber was “acclaimed as, architecturally, one of the finest in the United States.” Having looked in, though, I was inclined to accept. After the court outgrew the space in 1970, it became a senate hearing room.

As I left the building, the room with the reminder of my great uncle now had a class of high school students getting an introductory lecture before their tour. Among them were examples of the interested, the pretending-to-be-interested, and the bored, the same mix that would have been present when I visited the North Carolina State Capitol and Legislative Building as a school kid.

I took a swing through East Lansing on the way out of town, to see Michigan State University. As best I could tell, the heart of campus surrounds a loop road I circled, seeing nothing gripping, before going by big, green, Spartan Stadium, which impressed.

In checking my route to the Detroit area, I noticed MSU’s rival, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was not much of a detour. I don’t know why I thought it was on the other side of the state. So 45 minutes east of Lansing on I-96, the Sage and I turned south on US 23. Once on campus I consulted their online map, which is interactive and better at providing directions than any I’ve come across. Perhaps that’s because the campus is massive, spread out to a far greater degree than any I’ve visited.

For instance, my first destination was miles from the main campus. Wilson Plonk, one of my cousin’s kids—the genealogical term is “first cousin once removed”—started his collegiate arts training at NCSA, but finished up at the University of Michigan because of its stellar musical theatre program. He and his siblings John and Natalie, both of whom graduated Princeton, are irritatingly stellar at whatever they put their minds to. I’d been to Princeton, so I felt it only fair I see where Wilson worked (sang, and danced) his way to a baccalaureate.

Somehow it had not occurred to me that the musical theatre program was part of the music department, the first signs of which were the plain temporary ones for a piano sale pointing the way I was going. This brought up the minor regret that I didn’t accept my mother’s offer of piano lessons when I was twelve. I think I would have been relatively good at it, with my long fingers and conga-players’ rhythm. More importantly to me in younger days, I later noticed girls seem to like piano-playing guys. Not that this matters to me anymore.

I paid a parking fee, grumbling, sent Wilson a phone shot of the artsy-fartsy sculpture in front, and wandered in. I was overwhelmed by memories of walking past practice rooms at NCSA to an unorchestrated mishmash of beautiful music from a random mix of instruments. I tried to find a performance space he would have worked in, either for rehearsing or for-realsies, to no luck. But my wanderings led me to the department office. I walked up to the first person to greet me and said, “Odd question for you: I’m just a tourist, but a relative of mine graduated from here—musical theatre.” I was wondering where he would have performed, I continued. The answer was a theatre on main campus, and the likely rehearsal spaces were on North Campus, wherever that was. So I doubt he spent much, if any time, where I was. But, hey, I gave it a shot.

I followed the interactive map to get a glimpse of the main theatre, crawled through the unoriginal main campus, and utilized a Main Street detour before passing by the famous 100,000-spectator football stadium. From there I MapQuested my way to Michigan 14 and, a half-hour or so later, Dearborn.

Here we drove through an aging industrial area with massive dead buildings, then turned left into a massive parking lot by The Henry Ford. Yes, The Henry Ford. I managed to find a relatively close spot for the Sage and stepped into the tall ticket lobby, where the equally tall prices gave me a moment’s hesitation. Relative to the World Museum of Mining, I had even less understanding going in of why I identified this museum and factory complex as an itinerary must-see (assuming I took the northern route home). I didn’t even look at the website prior to arrival. I was there because the name triggered something in the back of my mind.

My first presumption was wrong, that this was the site of Ford’s first factory. The one here is a working truck plant, with exhibits about the process. Having been to a BMW plant, I didn’t feel the need to spend a significant chunk of time or change on that. Instead I went for the package deal on the indoor and outdoor sights, costing 60-ish bucks, and asked the cashier if she had a recommendation on which to do first. Given rain in the forecast, she said, “outdoors,” which I accepted. This required a long walk down an interior hall, out some doors, and farther back through a gate where I flashed my ticket before crossing a wide, round plaza. Finally I stepped onto the streets of Greenfield Village.

After looking inside the first building, from the 1830s, I realized I should find out exactly what this place is. I sat on a bench and opened the website on my phone.

Let’s start with the basics. Henry Ford was born during the Civil War in today’s Dearborn, at the time a farm community eight miles from Detroit, now a seamless extension of the Detroit megalopolis. He was raised a farm boy, got a part-time education for eight years, and at 16 walked to an already industrialized Detroit to get a job. After an interim move back, during which he had a part-time gig with an engine company, he returned to Detroit, married, and got a job with the power company. Ford spent his spare time designing a gasoline engine for cars. (Cars with small steam-boilers already existed.) He succeeded in 1893, and mounted it onto a horse carriage with bicycle wheels three years later. He then introduced an innovation in the nascent auto industry: He sold it. Inventors who preceded him kept theirs, and trust me, you haven’t heard of any of them.

Ford started an automobile company in 1899. He sold it a few years later, tired of pressure from his investors to sell a passenger model before it was ready. That company became Cadillac! In 1903 he sold shares to create the new Ford Motor Company, because he had pissed off the big-shot investors in town the first time around. Now his product was ready. He would have approved of the company’s 1980s tag line, “Quality is Job 1.”

Ford did not invent, but did radically improve, the assembly line. His true world-changing innovation was designing a product and production process that let him “‘build a motor car for the great multitude,’”5 Some information taken from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Ford. one that everyday people could afford. The resulting Model T represented half the output of the worldwide auto industry over the next 20 years. The one at right is from 1919, taken at the museum we’ll hit next. Ford also did not invent the gas-powered car or the progressive labor practices for which is is definitely given too much credit—his business partner came up with those. Instead Ford invented the auto industry as we know it today, for good and ill, and put his imprint on American business. When not permitted by shareholders, who thought they should get more profits, to invest in more business lines and those better management practices, he threatened to start a competing company and eventually bought them all out.

The year that car in the photo was made, his boyhood home came under threat due to a road expansion. He moved it here and restored it to its appearance as of his mother’s death in 1876. That planted the bug, and he began buying old buildings—first just representations of particular types, like a church and a covered bridge, and later actual historic buildings.

To whit: Do you know why many dictionaries (the actual book kind) are called “Webster’s Dictionary?” After graduating from what now is Yale University during the American Revolution, Noah Webster became a teacher and lawyer. At the time, education for young children was still based on the British system, and British books. He set out to create an American approach, resulting in The American Spelling Book in 1783, the year the war officially ended. It had the first set of standardized American spellings—and has been on sale ever since.6 A new copy of the 1824 edition is listed at $14.95 at Powell’s Books as I write this. But his biggest contribution to American society came when he produced the first major dictionary of American English, in 1828. He did so in a house in Hartford, Connecticut, near Yale, built five years earlier. A house that now sits in Dearborn. Ford bought it and moved it here, along with some of the original furnishings, and relics like the first edition above.

Noah Webster House, built 1823 (As far as I could tell, the stroller isn't original to the house) Hang on to your hats. We’re just getting started. But before we leave, I had a fun moment upstairs when a tween looked out the back window and noticed a soccer field there, excitedly pointing it out to her mom. “Noah Webster’s soccer field,” I joked.

“Yeah!” she played along.

Slave cabin from the Hermitage Plantation, Georgia, circa 1820 Across the street is the home of Thomas Edison’s grandparents. From Canada, 1915. We’ll get to Edison in a sec. Next door to Webster’s is a home the poet Robert Frost (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”) lived in while teaching at the University of Michigan. Across from that were unusually well-built brick slave quarters from a Georgia plantation. Though I honor Ford for including slave history, I also fear some people will think all slaves lived this “well,” rather than realizing this example was very much the exception.

Beyond that was the tiny Pennsylvania cabin in which William McGuffey was born. Remember that series of progressively harder books you went through as a primary school kid? After you successfully read some number at the lower level, the teacher let you move up to the next level? And it ticked you off when Tracy Watrous advanced a level before you did? (Maybe that was just me.) A textbook publisher came up with the idea in the 1830s, and hired McGuffy to write them. McGuffy injected a fair amount of American culture, some might say “propaganda,” into them, such that they shaped to some degree what Americans think this country is to this day.

Now let’s talk about Thomas Alva Edison. You may know him as the inventor of the light bulb. He wasn’t, but he evolved the first bulb bright, durable, and efficient enough to sell. He did come up with the phonograph and a crapload of other things, many of them industrial machines. Among these were those used in the first commercial power plants, in New York City. I stood in one of them, sort of. Ford had a replica built of one of the brick plant buildings and moved the original equipment to it. Jumbo No. 9, in the photo, was a dynamo that generated electricity from the plant’s steam generators in the next room.

Nikola Tesla, for whom the car company is named, originally worked for Edison in New York. But they became heated rivals in the 1880s over what kind of electricity was best for widespread use. Edison was a proponent of “direct current” (DC). This is electricity that travels in one direction through the wires, like battery power going from the “positive” end through the device to the “negative end.” This offers advantages in storage and safety, but the problem is, it can’t go very far. To power a city like New York, there would have to be a power plant every few blocks.

Electricity that quickly goes back and forth from the source (“alternating current” or AC) can go much farther, for technical reasons I won’t dig into. Tesla invented a machine for creating it, and the two went to verbal war. Edison went so far as to electrocute a circus elephant with AC to try to prove it was too dangerous! But Tesla was right, and, obviously, AC won out for powering anything that can hook up to the electrical grid or a generator.

Edison had a huge-for-the-time research laboratory built in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in the 1870s. I’ve always wanted to visit Menlo Park to see it. Good thing I didn’t, because, it’s in Dearborn now. Most of the buildings were gone, but Ford had what was left of them moved along with all the original equipment he could find, the buildings rebuilt using original plans and photos, and everything set up in its original orientation. I could not believe it. I’d seen pictures of Edison and assistants in this view of his lab, and now I was standing in it—in Michigan:

Speaking of industrial buildings I’ve always wanted to visit… As a North Carolinian who has seen the spot where the Wright Brothers mastered powered flight, the shop in Dayton, Ohio, where they built their flyer was long on my list. I’d spent the night in Dayton once, but for some reason didn’t think I had time to go to the shop I assumed was preserved there.

Good thing I didn’t. You can guess why.

Wilbur and Orville Wright were Midwest preacher’s sons. Wilbur was moved to, and Orville born in, Dayton because dad took an editor job at a church newspaper there. The family moved around as the father moved up to bishop. But Orville said years later a constant at home was encouragement of intellectual curiosity. However, he and Wilbur, alone among their siblings, did not attend college. After their mother died of tuberculosis in 1889, Orville talked Wilbur into opening a print shop. They began designing and selling improved printing presses, and a few years later shifted into the burgeoning bicycle industry. First they just sold and fixed them, and then they began improving those as well. Perhaps spurred by the death of an early glider inventor in a crash, they began researching aeronautics. That culminated in the 1903 flight on the Outer Banks of N.C., where strong predictable winds and soft sand provided ideal test flight conditions.

The interpreter in their cycle and airplane shop did an excellent job, and I asked her if she had been to Kitty Hawk. She had, and emphasized how striking it was to see how the flights got progressively longer. I asked her to point out what was original inside, besides the building. First up was one of five remaining Wright bikes in the world. She also pointed out the desk, safe, and a painting, and said the machines in back were the Wrights’.

Next door was the house the brothers stayed in while doing the work—their boyhood home. The interpreter there was talking to a young couple, and passed along a cool factoid. He pointed out others had built flyers, but they kept wrecking. What the Wrights achieved was controlled powered flight. He said a European working on the problem had predicted that bicycle makers would be the first to figure it out, because control at the time was an issue of maintaining balance.

Across the street was the house in which H.J. Heinz, as in Heinz ketchup, created many of his famous concoctions. Near Pittsburgh.

Which gives me pause. I am duly indebted to Mr. Ford for saving these buildings and furnishings of such importance to American and world history. Far too many such places have disappeared under the pressure of greed or indifference. I just wish he’d left them where they were. Yes, it was wonderful to see so many people getting little tastes of history through the actual buildings and artifacts. Having these collected in one place makes that easier for those who can get here. But Ford was rich enough to buy the land underneath them in their original settings, and so much is lost when you pull them out of context. The sense of place informs who these historical figures were, the choices they made, who they became, in the same way the places you lived affected you. Children whose families can’t afford to travel here lose out on a chance for inspiration from local history. And no doubt places like Dayton and Menlo Park could have used some portion of the tourist dollars now going to Dearborn.

The last building I visited is exempt from that complaint, however: Ford’s boyhood home. He dug up pieces of mom’s dishes at the old homesite so he could have her china re-created. A pair of interpreter women pointed out he had exact replicas of his mother’s carpet and wallpaper made, though they couldn’t confirm that Scalamandre had made them (the company I brought up in Helena). If furniture was missing, he found replicas. He searched more than a year for the exact model of stove his mother had, seen below. But the interpreters pointed out the corner desk in the back right was original.

The ticket-seller’s advice proved prescient. As I started back across the plaza, the first driplets of rain spritzed my shoulders. After the dozens of surprises outside, I was more than a little wary of what I would find inside the museum.

Naturally, vehicles. But what vehicles they were. For those of you not into such, maybe you’re about to be bored. I apologize. I’ll mostly focus on the ones that have some historical significance outside of car history. But gush, I must.

Easily one of the prettiest was not a car. William Ross of 208 Broadway in New York City, now the Fulton Center mall, made carriages for a living. Sometime around the 1790s he made one for an Irish immigrant, who’d done well as a trader, to give to his wife. When car people say “look at these lines,” referring to the shape, some vestigial memory must be comparing them to these:

Nearby was a trolley car, which was a bit ironic, given that Ford was part of a well-documented corporate conspiracy to kill public transit in the 1930s, when trolleys ran along tracks in most American cities. I sent a picture of the museum’s to my niece Melissa Ruffo, whom you’ll meet. It was from Fort Collins, Colo., where she went to college. I refuse to name the school because I blew a chunk of money I didn’t have on a semester in their online MBA program, only to learn I knew more about modern management than my professors did.

One of Henry Ford’s more infamous quotes, which he claimed to have made in 1909, was, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” The truth, as usual, is a bit more complicated. At the time he supposedly said it, one source indicates, Ford cars came in three colors, and all-black did not come true f or five another years.7 https://collectorsautosupply.com/blog/true-or-false-did-ford-really-say-any-color-the-customer-wants-as-long-as-its-black/. Black dried fast, so it fit Ford’s speedy new assembly line, and doing just one color meant no stopping to clean the paint shop between colors. Every Model T over the 19 years of that car dominating the industry came in black, like the one I showed you earlier.

Half of his reasoning went away in the early ’20s, when quick-dry colored paint was invented. The LaSalle Roadster was among those that forced Ford’s hand, like this green one from 1927 and its red, yellow, and blue brethren.

Speaking of Model Ts… Henry Ford’s wife, Clara? She didn’t drive one. And today’s electric cars? Very old school. She drove one, not a Ford, but a 1914 Detroit Electric:

Rather more heartwarming history sat a short distance away. The vehicle was nothing special, a 1975 FMC Motorhome. That “FMC” is not Ford Motor Company. The Food Machinery Corporation started out making agricultural spray pumps and moved into chemicals. FMC was one of the many manufacturers who switched gears, pun intended, to make war equipment during World War II, in its case tracked vehicles. When peace eventually killed that business, the company added what we now call recreational vehicles to its portfolio. But that’s not why this one warmed my heart.

When I was growing up, we were a “CBS Evening News” family. Every weeknight at 6:30, we had a standing appointment with Walter Cronkite, easily the most famous TV news anchor in history. One regular segment was “On the Road with Charles Kuralt,” an avuncular UNC-Chapel Hill journalism graduate who traveled the country chronicling its good or weird sides. In one of these:

This was the last of several over 27 years. The segment was a favorite of my mother, and I enjoyed it, too, which gave us something we both wanted: a moment we could enjoy together. Mother and I were very different people. We struggled mightily throughout my adolescence. Anyplace we could find safe common ground, even for a few minutes, we both appreciated. Charles Kuralt did that for us. My eyes water as I write that. They didn’t as I wandered around the motor home, but I lingered as I wandered, looking in every window and deep into my past.

The very next vehicle corrected a somewhat younger misconception. To get to my first house, the one Kerrie and I shared in Albuquerque, you drove a few miles off I-40 on Unser Boulevard.8 My second house, in Durham, where I am writing this, also is a couple miles off I-40. Before Kerrie moved, I planned someday to get on I-40, drive a few days, and get off on Unser Boulevard. I always thought it was just randomly chosen to be named for a family of auto racers famous in the sport and based in ABQ, among my favorites when I was still watching the sport. Jerry Unser, the name on the door, was the dad; Al and Bobby were the names I first knew, and there was at least a third generation of drivers. Then I saw this truck, and noticed the address on the side: “7700 Central S.W.” Central Boulevard is the main east-west drag in town, but the number grabbed my attention. I went to MapQuest and found this address was at the corner of… Unser Boulevard.

Did you ride a school bus, like most Americans at some point in their scholastic careers? Was it a Blue Bird, like the majority of them for much of school bus history? The oldest known example was a couple vehicles down:

I swear to you I am not discussing every vehicle in the joint, including the massive 1941 steam locomotive I acted like I was driving, after a kid jumped out of the engineer’s seat, clipping my heel without apology. Or:

the Lotus race car that was the exact full-size version, down to the color, of one of my favorite Matchbox9 England’s Lesney Products started producing tiny, realistic models of real vehicles in metal in the 1950s, naming the line “Matchbox” because the toys came in cardboard packages that size. I loved them, eventually owning more than 500, not to mention some larger versions, and airplanes and trains. Then Hot Wheels came along as a direct competitor, but with imaginary vehicles, which I detested; my hatred of fakeness started early. I sold most of my collection to an antique dealer as part of fitting into the “monk’s cell” in Seattle. cars as a kid;

the world-record holder for 25 years for land speed without a jet engine (409 mph in 1965);

a 1901 sports car Henry Ford personally drove in a road race, hitting speeds up to 72 mph;

a close cousin to the first car I remember catching my eye, a red Ford Mustang in downtown Orlando when I was four, this one white from 1965; or

the steam-powered car from 100 years earlier. That’s right. A car was invented during the Civil War!

No, I will skip to the line of five vehicles given extra elbow room at one end of the huge space. The first, a horse-drawn carriage, was the presidential limousine of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt. The inveterate outdoorsman didn’t like those newfangled automobiles when he was in office in the early 1900s.

In front of it was the engine-drawn limousine of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy’s third cousin, who served during the Depression and World War II. I’d seen pictures of it, a 1939 Lincoln that a sign declared, “The first car expressly designed and built for a president.” Included were features to help him enter and exit, polio having paralyzed his legs.

Remember our visit to Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s hometown? Ike’s limo from his presidential stint is in front of Roosevelt’s, which explains why it isn’t in Abilene.

But the stunner of the bunch was Ike’s successor’s. Here is a closeup:

That is the spot Pres. John F. Kennedy was sitting in when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1962. I’ll let that sink in a minute.

He and his photojournalist wife, Jackie, were waving to the crowds in the original convertible version of this 1961 Lincoln. Then his head jerked and he slumped over, and the sound of one or more gunshots echoed off the buildings. She, understandably freaked out, started to climb out over the back as the car sped away. The Secret Service re-seated her in her pink dress with the red blood stain. A sniper in a nearby high-rise was arrested, and he later was killed in a courthouse. The events have been awash in conspiracy theories—not entirely implausible—ever since, involving other shooters and hidden powers behind the killing.

The main reason I was stunned was not only being this close to one of the biggest (in size and impact) artifacts of American history. It was the fact it still exists. I had assumed the vehicle was quietly smashed into a pancake in some scrapyard shortly after the assassination. Instead, they put a top on it, changed the seat cover (I hope), and kept using it through two later presidents! Can you imagine? You’re the most powerful person in the free world10 A common epithet for the U.S. president in those days of a “Cold War” between mostly Western democracies and mostly Eastern Communist countries. , and you have to sit in the same seat your predecessor was killed in?

It made the last limo, the one by which Pres. Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, anticlimactic. A mentally ill young man, John Hinckley, somehow thought this would impress actress Jodie Foster and get her attention. Reagan and two others who were wounded recovered, but his press secretary James Brady became wheelchair-bound and had permanent brain damage.

The historical stunners were not yet done. There is a section of the museum dedicated to artifacts from American History. I did not expect to see much I’d not seen before.

Wrong again, yeck breath.11 A favorite saying of Steve’s. He couldn’t explain what a “yeck” was. I’m not even sure that’s the correct spelling. Not that there is one.

One point of contention between Britain and its American colonies was the latter refusing to pony up the cash Britain felt owed for sending troops to defend them during the French and Indian War. In response, Parliament extended a tax on some paper goods to the colonists. Now, this stamp tax—so-called because the paper had to bear a government stamp proving the tax was paid—had been in place in England for decades without much controversy. But the arrangement here was that colonists paid taxes to their colonial legislatures, and those legislatures paid the King’s treasury. This is why that saying, “no taxation without representation,” arose. Colonists weren’t given seats in Parliament. The law extending the tax here was called the Stamp Act. The museum has an original copy from 1765, as you see at right.

After the anger spun into war, George Washington slept here often:

That’s his cleverly designed camp bed, which folded out of the trunk.

A later president, Abraham Lincoln, was resting his bones on a chair at the theatre one night, after leading his nation to victory in the Civil War. He and his wife were in a box to the right of the stage. Partway through the performance, a supporter of the Confederacy snuck into the box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. The shooter was an actor named John Wilkes Booth, which is why no one in the theatre would have questioned his roaming the halls. Booth jumped out of the box directly to the stage, yelled, “Thus always to tyrants” in Latin12 “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” , and limped away, having hurt his leg. Lincoln was pulled from the chair and carried across the street to a rooming house, where he died the next morning. His blood was left behind. That’s it there—the dark spots on the actual chair. I don’t know how long I stood there trying to comprehend… all of this.13 Mike Johnson from Jackson was disappointed to learn this. Originally from D.C., he had acted at Ford’s Theatre, and snuck into the box to sit in the chair there, thinking it was original.

Lincoln was killed for working to free millions of human beings held in forced labor camps against their will, many from birth until death, on pain of death or torture. Torture like having to wear the hideous thing to the left on your neck for years after trying to escape, a collar with three prongs to prevent sleep. I found almost as moving a pair of sandals woven out of reeds like little baskets. That was all many field hands had to protect their feet while working sunup to sundown.

Frederick Douglass One enslaved person who escaped went on to become a famous speaker across America. His autobiography, a first edition of which is here, helped spur those who opposed slavery into action. Frederick Douglass himself was a genteel sort, and like many of that sort had cards made to leave when he dropped in on someone and they weren’t receiving. For richer folk, making the rounds in the evening and leaving cards was a common practice. He had his picture printed on his. Unfortunately my picture of it did not turn out well enough to include here, so I grabbed this one off the Web because I wanted you to see him. He looks as impressive as he was.

The last stop in this Civil Rights section proved to be the reason for my feeling I had to come here without knowing why. As soon as I saw the front end of a green-and-yellow bus, I recalled a piece I saw on a news program about it. Then I remembered vowing that I must come see it, a vow that obviously decamped for my subconscious until I was throwing places to visit onto the itinerary.

After Reconstruction ended, European-Americans took back the small portion of social power that had spread to African-Americans through a combination of violence and cheating. In Wilmington, N.C., for example, a planned riot facilitated a coup that kicked out the elected town leaders and replaced them with whites. This is also the period when whites created the myth that the Civil War was fought over “state’s rights” instead of slavery. Massive amounts of documentation from the time, from letters to laws, make clear everyone knew the war was primarily fought over slavery. All of the documents the Southern states used to rebel against the United States made indirect or direct reference to it. I’ve seen a handwritten copy of Mississippi’s from the time, and it explicitly states this. (Before the war, when Northern states passed laws banning the return of escaping slaves to their masters, Southern states vociferously fought against those states’ rights and forced passage of a Federal bill overruling those laws, the “Fugitive Slaves Act.” In short, the primary right Southern leaders were fighting for was their perceived “right” to own other human beings.)

After they failed and Reconstruction ended, Southern and some Western states passed many laws that pushed blacks as close to slavery as the racists could get them. One set that dated back to the end of the war in some places became more widespread, known as “Jim Crow laws.”14 “Jim Crow” was a character portrayed by a white vaudeville performer in black makeup (“blackface”) in the 1830s, filled with racist stereotypes. The name became a put-down for blacks. I’ve never found a source explaining how these laws became known by that name. These were intended to keep light-skinned and dark-skinned people as separate as possible except when blacks were serving whites.

Many groups formed to push back. A Montgomery, Ala., seamstress for a department store volunteered as the secretary for the local chapter of one group, the NAACP.15 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A city law required black people to ride in the back of city buses if whites filled up the fronts; in those days, far more people of all colors rode buses. However, another law prohibited anyone, regardless of color, from being forced to give up their seat for any reason. On the first day of December in 1955, the seamstress got on the bus downtown and sat in an empty seat near the front. A stop or two later, more whites got on, and the bus driver (illegally) told the four blacks in the white section to move back.

Rosa Parks didn’t.

After yelling a bit, the bus driver called for the cops. They came onboard, arrested her, and pulled her off this bus.

This bus. The one I was standing next to in Dearborn:

Tourists were scattered throughout the front, listening to an interpreter on the side-facing bench behind the driver seat. I went through the back door mostly used by black folks back in the day. I sat in my preferred bus seat, the bench all the way in the back, and listened as she finished Parks’ tale and went into Q&A. In the course of that it came out that a blond 12-year-old was sitting in the seat, the one Parks was in. As the crowd broke up, a gentleman standing near me said, “So we’re expecting great things from you, young lady!” She didn’t respond, but I thought it was sweet, and was glad to hear it coming from an older white guy, breaking the stereotype of all of us being overt racists.

After the others all left, I reverently made my way to the seat, the second forward-facing one on the right. I greeted the interpreter, a twentyish white woman, but she let me sit in silence. After a long moment looking out the window, I told her I was trying not to cry in public. I failed, and wiped away a tear. “So much courage,” I finally stammered. She gently said she understood.

Courage, in all its forms—physical, moral, political, artistic—inspires me. When I tell people I am a fan of women’s collegiate gymnastics, they seem to assume, and some say, it’s just because of the leotards. I’ve never denied enjoying the sight of bare athletic, female legs, but if that were the main draw I’d watch a lot more volleyball. The physics-defying feats these relatively tiny women accomplish are jaw-dropping, yes, and would keep me watching if they shifted to unitards. However, the courage I know it takes to even attempt those feats in practice, for example to jump backwards and, without using your hands, land on a four-inch-wide beam well above the ground, that mystifies me.

But the courage of the woman who sat here in this seat I was in… that was something of a different order. My insides were clenching, and that bus transported me back in time, first to my driving loop through the American Southeast in 2016, and then to 1955. I have been to “the bus corner… the bus-stop corner,” I struggled to tell her, meaning the one where Parks was arrested. Now I was looking through the same window through which she spotted the cops coming for her.

Her arrest prompted a black women’s political group to organize a boycott of the bus system. The NAACP and local ministers, one of them named Martin Luther King, Jr., joined in. For around a year people walked or car-pooled rather than ride buses. Meanwhile the NAACP sued to have the transit segregation laws declared unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed a year later, ending both the segregation and the boycott.

After moving to the bench seat across from the interpreter, I asked her what the toughest question was that she faced. The answer was black kids asking why black people had to move. I asked what her answer was. “Some people just have hate in them,” and some still do, she tells them. She said she found it hard to express this to them, especially as a white woman. I told her it was a good answer, and thanked her for doing what she does.

After that, the remaining artifacts lost their zing. One with personal significance was the last of the original 1952 Wienermobiles, shaped and branded like an Oscar Meyer hot dog as rolling advertisements, later versions of which I saw a couple times in younger years. Then came the dreadful moment when something I bought new was found on display as a museum piece. Worse, the Atari 2600 game console behind glass was a year younger than the 1981 version in my closet, which still works.

I was disappointed I couldn’t climb into an old harvester in the farm implements collection, which closed 15 minutes before the museum did. The last artifact of note was another house, but this one was inside. Built by the Beech Aircraft Corp., the portable house had the same shiny steel sides as their airplanes in the 1940s. I told the young interpreter about a round permanent house designed by my architect grandfather, who explained the shape was more efficient. The interpreter said, then I was the person to ask why, because this house had been advertised that way. The reason is duct work. In my house, the heating and air conditioning unit is at one end, so all of the air gets sent through tubes the length of the house. Besides requiring a big enough unit to push it forcefully through openings the whole way, every inch is an opportunity to lose some of that air, and thus waste some of the energy I paid for. In a round house, you just put the HVAC unit in the middle, and the openings in the central core. By the same means you can save on electrical wire. And repair costs.

I’d missed the guided tours inside, but you can see pretty much everything from the outside. The most fascinating part to me was how you made it portable. It folded up like an umbrella. The top of the ribs afforded the most modern-artish photo of the trip:

As I closed the place down and walked into the parking lot, I found myself getting spritzed. The wet pavement proved my cashier had made the right call.

Now I was on a mission to make nephew Marty jealous again. I plugged an address into MapQuest. We went for a somewhat winding traverse through the Detroit suburbs until I was on one of those incredibly broad boulevards you may have seen on TV with oddly wide medians. I pulled over where MQ told me to, took a picture on the phone and sent it to him. He responded with satisfying envy.

Like millions around the world, I grew up thinking I had a special relationship with Motown that no one else enjoyed. Hits from the old-house-turned-studio with “Hitsville, U.S.A.” splayed across the front shaped this country’s culture. I’m not going to relay the history here for three reasons. First, no matter where you’re from, you’ve probably heard of Motown. Second, if you haven’t, you need to hear it. Go to your favorite music streaming service and plug in the word. The third reason we’ll get to in a couple of days. But I was across the street a while, staring at the building and hearing music in my head. Tour reservations were booked out two weeks ahead. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know what route I was taking East, much less when I might be in Detroit. Bummer. Apparently I was missing a party, too.

I booked a hotel just across the line in Ohio and made one last stop on the way to the highway. I’ve mentioned Fort Detroit a number of times on this trip, starting back in Kentucky with Daniel Boone’s involuntary trip here. I already knew there was nothing left of the site except a plaque on a hotel in the heart of downtown. But I knew the roads that roughly outlined the site. Ten minutes later I drove them, pausing briefly at a small road running by or maybe through the hotel, on the bluff above the Detroit River that was a great defensive position for the fortification. It also afforded an excellent view of Detroit’s iconic building, the black towers of the Renaissance Center, which I’d only seen in passing 20 years earlier. With no easy parking, I took a quick shot through the rain-dotted passenger window.

The rest of today’s drive was an urban uglyscape all the way to the hotel. Every major chain seems to require a trendy irreverent brand, and this is certainly Tru for Hilton. That’s not a misspelling ; it’s the brand name of the hotel I entered in Perrysburg, Ohio. The clerk behind the in-the-round desk in the brightly colored open-floor-plan lobby had an arm in a sling. “Have you been getting in bar fights again?,” I asked.

She grinned. “No, rotator cuff.” It had just happened, she said. I said I commiserated, based on lots of martial arts injuries. She said she wondered if her combination of karate as a kid, softball as a teen, and fire-hose races for her fire-chief dad had made her more susceptible. I wasn’t expecting that last one, I must say. He used to have her race the new trainees, she said, who were embarrassed when a 12-year-old girl beat them!

In no mood for fancy food, I decided dinner was going to be from the Subway across the highway, eaten in my room while I wrote, and that I was going to drive instead of walking as I usually would. The heavily tattooed, tongue-pierced girl working the counter by herself in a travel center was all “Honey” and “Love,” an appealing mix of outer badass and inner kindness. I said I thought I had earned a cookie today, intending to buy one. She not only agreed, she insisted on giving me five for free, explaining her day was ending, and she needed to get rid of them. I told her she was incredibly sweet, and she said she wanted to make sure I came back to see her. I took this in the professional sense she meant, and didn’t have the heart to tell her that was never going to happen. If I lived anywhere in the area, though, that would have become my local Subway no matter how many I drove past to get there.

After dinner and writing, I made a phone call I’d been debating for a few days. My niece Melissa Ruffo and her family live in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y. I had not seen them in a brace of years, and Melissa had texted me earlier in the summer about the fact they now own a lake house on one of the glacier-carved “finger lakes.” She knew I was a competitive swimmer growing up, and has seen me frolic like a teenager as a 50-something at the beach. (I adore body surfing.) Her play worked, though given the day of the week and my remaining must-dos on the itinerary, it was clear I wasn’t going to make it there during the weekend. With no forewarning, I texted her, “So… you have a lake house, you say?” In response, she simply texted the address.