Sun., August 13: Magic, Martyrdom and Music

The next morning’s drive on I-77 North was magical, marked by low cloud lines hanging between sharp green hills. At first I assumed they lined streams, but no, they were just hanging about. I recalled the last line of my favorite Zen poem:

Green mountains father white clouds:

white clouds are the children of mountains.

White clouds hang around all day.

Mostly the mountain doesn’t mind.1 T’ung-shan Liang-chieg (807-869), in M. Levering (ed.), Zen: Images, Texts, and Teachings (New York: Artisan, 2000).

Twenty minutes out, I took US 36 northeast a few miles farther through the green, until passing under a high bridge which I was surprised to learn I would be driving over. The town I was heading for was south, you see, so I was expecting a southerly exit. A sign a short distance past the bridge pointed me onto a northward curve past a pretty reservoir off the Tuscarawas River and over the bridge.

This Ohio river has a North Carolina connection: The Tuscarora for whom it is named lived in what later became N.C. when Europeans showed up. The pattern of the next 150 years of Native/European relations followed, of initial cooperation, strained coexistence, increasing conflicts, and open warfare that—despite a 1715 Tuscarora victory—resulted in their moving northwest to become the sixth nation of an “Iroquois Confederacy” that still exists.

The road dropped off the bridge and led me into the definitive “quaint little town,” Gnadenhutten, dominated by a Moravian church just past the cute couple blocks of downtown:

Seeing no sign for the historical park I sought, I drove through to pass pretty middle-class homes, circled back, and finally spotted a tiny pointer among a stack of them on the corner across from the church. I followed it to the town cemetery, where I parked and got out to inspect several settler-style buildings of indeterminate age around a green rectangle. By one of them sat a small concrete block with a plaque on it under a wood sign stating, “Birthplace of First White Child Born in Ohio.” That birth was a harbinger of the terror that would soon be experienced in this place so peaceful early on a Sunday morning.

That child was born to Moravian missionaries. The Moravians, more formally the Unitas Fratrum or United Brethren, were an early form of Protestant church, named after the section of today’s Germany in which they formed. Persecuted there, they eventually relocated to Pennsylvania. They, too, have a North Carolina connection, one group moving there in the 1760s and founding what now is the Old Salem living museum in Winston-Salem, near NCSA. A smaller group moved to a Lenni Lenape (“Delaware”) town here in 1772 to convert the locals. The next year, John Lewis Roth was born. He turned three the day his birth date took on extra meaning: July 4th.

The Moravians were pacifists, and refused to participate on either side when the American Revolution broke out. This made both sides distrust and harass them throughout the war. Near the end in 1781, the British abruptly forced both the Moravians and the Lenni Lenape to the west, leaving crops in their fields. Given that they didn’t have time to plant crops in the new place, famine became a real possibility. The Lenni Lenape got permission to return to Gnadenhutten in March to harvest anything surviving in their old fields.

It was really bad timing.

Several weeks earlier, warriors had attacked white settlers (invaders in their view) in western Pennsylvania. The Penn militia went searching for the attackers, and for revenge. What they found was a bunch of Native American Moravians gathering food. The militia didn’t care that they were “Christianized.” Men were moved into one cabin and women and children another, held overnight, and killed outside two to three at a time the next day. Two young boys escaped. The other 90 or so human beings were murdered by Patriots, along with others brought in from other Moravian villages nearby . This small tumulus retains some portion of the remains. Gnadenhutten can be translated, by the way, to “huts of mercy.”

A rather confusing sign at the base said, “Burial Place of 1782: Remains of 1798: Indian Martyrs.” The little museum to the left would not open till 1, so I was not going to get an answer, nor do I find one online. But I had accomplished my mission. Having gone to college near Old Salem, and being close friends with two elderly Moravians from those days, I wanted to see this once-terrible, now quiet place.

Looking around, I noticed an unusually high percentage of veteran graves given this was a non-military cemetery. I say this having spent an awful lot of time in cemeteries, as a history buff and now history writer whose first car was a hearse. I walked around a bit in the dewy grass and thanked a few, noting specially veterans from the Revolution; the Grand Army of the Republic (U.S. troops in the Civil War); and World War I.

After continuing south to get a look at the rest of town, on the way back north I stopped in front of the church to get the downtown pic above, parking by a horse trough on the corner, with water flowing. I thought it a nice cosmetic touch until I turned around and noticed the small sign next to the Sage. “Buggy Parking Only,” it said, an arrow pointing accusitorily at my car.

I left with some reluctance, glancing curiously at two little cafes in the town center. But I had a longtime wish-list item to cover today. We took the bridge and arced back past the pretty reservoir to continue our northeast journey on US 36. After five miles we picked up US 250 in Uhrichsville and headed northwest for the last time on this Northwest Passage. Eventually regaining an old friend from North Carolina, I-77, I took it north, in Canton throwing a wistful glance at the NFL Hall of Fame and stadium, which I visited in 1990 after Chillicothe.

Nearing Cleveland, I kicked on MapQuest, and once in town was confounded by the gap between the mileage on highway signs for my destination and the figure in the app. My guess is the signs assume a more direct route, while MQ bypassed me around to the east.

I was headed, of course, for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. If as I had hoped, the crowds were smaller on Sunday morning, I’d hate to arrive on a Saturday afternoon. Parking was unobvious—I still don’t know if the place has a parking deck. Certainly nothing was available on the adjacent streets, so I headed back along a side road, upset to see that the pay lots were charging on a Sunday. But we didn’t have to go much farther before I saw I could prepay to park all day for $7 at the Lakeside Airport, a general aviation strip sticking into Lake Erie. We even found a shady spot from which the Sage could watch the planes.

As soon as I got back to the concourse before the museum, I stopped to take a long-planned jealously shot for nephew Marty. Before texting a selfie version of the next pic with me sticking my tongue out through a smarmish grin, I prepped him by saying, “Stretch those jealousy muscles…”

“Should’ve stretched more,” he responded. “I just pulled one.”

Marty kindly attributes me as having turned him onto music as a teen. I was never the music-head he thought me to be—or so I thought. I have a fairly wide range of musical tastes. Most country escapes me, though I love Willie Nelson, as does most rap. (The latter is part of a larger distaste for poetry and spoken-word art; my brain is just too prosaic to enjoy it, though I appreciate the talent each form takes.) As I was pre-writing this in my head before getting up one morning, though, it occurred to me that the vast majority of the names I saw in the Hall were at least familiar, if not their music. So maybe I’m more of a music-head than I thought.

The next problem was getting to see it. Instead of a ticket booth or desk like every other museum I’ve been to in my entire life, there was just a young lady at a narrow mobile stand explaining that she didn’t sell tickets. She directed me to a QR code on a sign to make an online payment. My other choice was a kiosk at which there was a long line. This raised a host of questions. The most pressing is that I don’t use my phone for payments, for both privacy and security reasons. The second is that when it comes to typing on that little screen, I’m all thumbs. But I stepped over to a balcony rail, grudgingly mistyped and retyped my info into the phone, and finally got a barcode to show her.

I bypassed the cafe for now, already resigned to overpaying for lunch there. I took the long escalator ride under rock show scenic elements down to the basement. There I entered a temporary exhibit I didn’t think I’d spend much time in, for reasons already mentioned, celebrating 50 years of hip hop.

Yet again, wrong, yeck breath.

I learned something within seconds. The first glass case contained outfits from Public Enemy, including a clock necklace I recognized as rapper Flavor Flav’s circa 1988. I knew of Public Enemy, but my non-rap-fan brain did not know that group was the source of his fame. It was fun to learn this, and to see the original clock, and unrelated to Public Enemy, a gold “CoolJ” necklace from, obviously, LL Cool J.

The next standalone case stopped me dead. In 1985, rock group Aerosmith did a mashup of their breakout hit from my day, “Walk This Way,” with one of the first rap super groups, Run-D.M.C. The video had the two bands performing the tune in their distinctive genres in adjoining rooms, until Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler uses a mic stand to puncture the wall between them—symbolically and literally. It went into frequent rotation on MTV2 Music Television premiered as a cable channel in 1981, just showing music videos around the clock interspersed with veejay (video jockey) banter and music news in between. My girlfriend of the time and I checked it out the first afternoon. , the best sign of video success in those days, and generated many column-inches of copy about the divisions between rock and rap. And now I was standing in front of clothing, sunglasses, and a guitar from the video. This provided the first confirmation I was in for an emotional few hours.

To that point… after a bit of internal dialog, I have decided not to do a deep dive into the history in which I was immersed at the museum. This book is already longer than I anticipated with several days yet to go, and doing so might take as many or more pages as we’ve yet passed. Also, I don’t have the depth of background in music history that I do in the other topics we’ve covered, so it would take a lot more research. I’d like to finish this book before I take my next big trip. Herein I will only hit my emotional highlights.

To that point, about a half-hour into my visit, I realized if I kept taking pictures of everything that interested me, I would take pictures of everything. I forced myself to only shoot artifacts to which I felt a direct connection. Given my wide tastes, I’m not sure it helped much. Every time I thought I’d seen everything that would move me, I turned a corner to find another. I also decided to skip the videos, and most of the reading, figuring I could do both via Internet and libraries. My focus was on experiencing the artifacts. Apologies for the quality of said pics, many marred by the paradoxical combination of low light and reflective glass.

Anyway, I was surprised to realize how many of the hip-hop names I knew. Queen Latifah’s dress stood out. Lovie Eastep having worn an NWA tee-shirt, I sent her a shot via Lori of a hoodie worn by the group—though I don’t know whether her shirt was about the group or just the saying (“N{-word}3 More specifically, the version ending in “-ah” used by Blacks to reduce the power of the racist “-er” version. With Attitude”).

As I moved into the permanent exhibits, paraphernalia of early legends slowed my progress, like sunglasses that covered the blind eyes of piano master and singer Ray Charles. His vocal phrasings captivated me as a kid. One song, “Hit the Road Jack,” which got memorable use in a short-lived TV series about a bad boss, manages to combine humor with just the right amount of angst. He was funny on the variety shows as well, and his brief turn as a music store owner showing “The Blues Brothers” how music’s done stole the movie.

A more unusual item came with a backstory. Below a classic black fedora sat a thin briefcase, adjacent a burgundy electric guitar and a Hohner Marine Band harmonica like the one sitting on my bookshelf. Chester Burnett was born in Mississippi, and used music to get himself out of the cotton fields in which Jim Crow laws trapped people long after slavery supposedly ended. Along the way he picked up the moniker Howlin’ Wolf. He is a major reason the term “Chicago blues” exists, and many rockers like The Rolling Stones acknowledged him as an influence.

He was at the tail end of the migration of millions of American Blacks who moved from the South to the North in the first half of the 1900s to escape segregation and lack of opportunities. Employers needing workers coordinated with African-American newspapers like Chicago Defender4 Founded in 1905 and still in existence as an online publication. to attract the migrants. Things were not, of course, as rosy for Blacks “up North” as the pictures painted. Prejudice and discriminatory practices and white violence existed there as well, evidenced by a 1919 “race riot” lasting five days that killed nearly 40 people and wounded 500 of both races, while putting a thousand Blacks out of their homes. Relative to the South’s violence-enforced apartheid, though, let’s say the North was rose-colored.

Perhaps Wolf was one of the many in his generation who lost faith in banks, when so many of those collapsed during the Great Depression. Many people lost their savings. (The government then created a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that protects accounts up to a limit, which explains the “FDIC” signs at your local branch or bank website.) He would have been well aware of systemic discrimination by banks against people of color, such as their refusing to give mortgages to qualified Blacks at all, or at least in certain neighborhoods. Regardless, the exhibit said, “Howlin’ Wolf did not trust banks and kept all of his valuable belongings and money in this case,” and took it onstage during shows.

It took a delightful forever to bounce between the cases on each side of that first hallway and the people crowded within. One younger woman was wearing a mask, and we had similar interests, because here and beyond we kept circling each other. I tried to give her six feet, but this was often impossible, and no one else was.

From there I was released, somewhat, into a larger area nearly as crowded. This featured another Mississippi native, named Elvis Presley. On my Southeast trip, I visited the home he was born in, a linear two-room “shotgun house” his father physically built in Tupelo.

I like Elvis. His hit-making years had little overlap with my music-awareness years. His last #1 was in 1969. “Burning Love” hit #2 when I was 12, and that was the end of his string of top hits dating back to the mid-1950s. I became more aware of him came through his movies, watched in TV reruns. Like the rest of America, I then watched his slow decline into drinking and drugs and obesity. That effectively killed him five years after that #2 hit, aged 42 but looking a decade older.

Ironically, my favorite of his songs came out when I was 8, but I didn’t know that until 2003. “A Little Less Conversation” was used as the theme song for a TV show that came out that year. Enthralled, I looked it up and got a double surprise—both its age and the singer. Along with his white suit with black accents I recognized, the exhibit included a guitar, and a motorcycle I shot on my phone and sent to Guy. I was not caught up in the religious fervor displayed by many people on bench seats before a movie screen showing Elvis, but I enjoyed hanging with his stuff a bit.

Past that section, the Beatles arrived. Various accouterments were more of interest to my historical side for their cultural impact than my musical side, as I was never a mega-fan. Chief among these was a beat-up piano. On this John Lennon and Paul McCartney composed “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “We Can Work it Out” in the basement of the parental home of the latter’s girlfriend, in which he was also resident. My image of the two of them huddled over it was, sadly, replaced in my mind by scenes related to Lennon’s death. I was in New York City at the time, learning of his death by reading a newspaper over someone’s shoulder on the subway. Thanks to a date living across the street from The Dakota apartment building where he was killed, I saw the memorial to him when picking her up the next week. This slight touch of personal history, plus my own preference for round glasses, made a pair of John’s touching to see through mine.

Past their case I turned into a small photo gallery for my own religious experience. By means unknown, presumably the radio, I found my way in college to an album called “The Mothership Connection” by Parliament. One song, “Watching the Way You Move,” became a hymn to my sorta-sister and brief girlfriend, a modern dancer who was mesmerizing in school dances held in the tiny Commons at NCSA. A line in another could easily have been spoken by me at the time, given my strained maternal relationship: “If you see my mo-ther, tell her I’m, al-right, just funkin’ around, for fun.” The music had so many layers, the lyrics beyond clever, the vocal mix and clean instrumentation creating a deceptively immersive experience, I was captured for life. The album told stories of an alternative universe in which Dr. Funkenstein visited the Earth in the age of the Pyramids to introduce funk music to humankind.

I had no idea at the time this was a super-group among Black folks. Only years later did I come to appreciate the breadth of genres crossed by Parliament, which started as a 1960s do-wop group, and Funkadelic, the name under which the same huge number of diverse personnel stretched their boundaries. All was done under the guiding hand of George Clinton, a drug-addled genius. I heard him admit in a radio interview he knew he had visited the actual British Parliament, but had no memory of it because he was high. I own a CD set he drew on and autographed while I watched, at a show in Portland, Ore., and have since seen him in little ol’ Durham.

The gallery featured the music-venue work of photographer Bruce Talamon, much of it showing P-Funk in its 1970s prime. For copyright reasons I can’t include them here, but seeing a close-up of the Mothership prop that lowered Clinton down to the stage as Funkenstein was a thrill. But a shot showing the pure joy of a dozen P-Funkers making art together onstage in Los Angeles in 1977 was the quintessence of the good humans are capable of, an assuring counterbalance to all the evil I’d trailed on this trip. I left the gallery with some warmth in my cold dead heart.

Having learned to sew in college, during a required stint in costuming as a backstage worker, I appreciated the efforts behind a black suit from the “man in black” Johnny Cash, of country fame; an iconic yellow dress only R&B diva Diana Ross could have worn so well; a geometric jumpsuit from Black rock pioneer Little Richard; a black hat and shirt studded with Batman symbols worn by one of The Eagles; Mick Jaggers’ sleeveless tee with a pattern of the Rolling Stones’ protruding tongue logo; a purple pullover from the tragic talent Janis Joplin; a Taylor Swift lace catsuit; and a plain shirt from Buddy Holly. An influential ’50s rocker, his death in a plane crash with several other stars was dubbed “the day the music died” in the massive 1972 hit “American Pie” by Don McClean.

But a hat hit me hard. Though given the pejorative term “blaxploitation” by some, a number of films by and for black artists in the 1970s made clear the power of the African-American dollar at movie theaters. The negative term probably refers to some typical ghetto settings/plots and stereotypical characters. But their lead characters often pushed the bounds of those stereotypes, such as female detective Jackie Brown, portrayed by Pam Grier. Two such movies also produced earth-shattering soundtrack albums, Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft” and “Superfly” by Curtis Mayfield.

Mayfield explored the pain of the drug culture with smooth vocals and melodic hooks belying the topic at hand. His iconic tam hovers over one of his guitars at the Hall. Being a hat guy, if I could have worn it out of the joint, I would have. As it is, I spent an inordinate amount of time just staring. Mayfield’s story later took a turn toward pathos when part of the show lighting at a 1990 gig fell on him, turning him instantly paraplegic.

Only a former techie5 As backstage workers are called. It threw me when I first heard the term appl ied to software engineers. could fully appreciate the “flight case” of Chuck Magee, a long-time “roadie” for the Stones after starting as a guitar tech for the group’s Ronnie Wood beforehand. He also engineered (ran the sound mixing board) for the Stones’ hit, “It’s Only Rock and Roll.” The flight case was a vertical box on wheels of an ilk I often helped manhandle in my theatre days, opened to display parts drawers covered in stickers. The best by far was the one at lower left claiming that the case sat in a “work-free drug place.”

I took a lot of shots of handwritten lyrics, only to realize toward the end of my visit that “reproduction history” had returned to bedevil me. Looking through my photos now, I confirm they were all copies, which I refuse to show you on principle.

Next came a large section with stage setups of various bands: The Allman Brothers; Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, featuring a saxophone owned by Clarence Clemmons that contributed so much to the band’s unique sound; the incomparable Chaka Khan, whose turn as lead singer for Rose Royce produced another iconic soundtrack, “Car Wash”; Alice Cooper’s white top hat; and two jumpsuits from James Brown, who I saw live in Seattle well past his prime—but he still killed. A unique item in the museum was along the wall in this section, a 3½-inch floppy disk. The letter that accompanied it explained it contained a digital image of the sign that begat the media phrase “the artist formerly known as Prince,” sent from his company Paisley Park Enterprises “2 help U, the press, writes (symbol)’s name…”6 Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol for a time. Why, I can’t explain.

Also on that wall was an outfit I recalled from my childhood worn by Sly Stone. The 1973 album from Sly and the Family Stone, “Fresh,” is an indescribable mix of styles, demonstrating the most unique vocal timings since Frank Sinatra, including Sly’s signature take on “Que Sera, Sera.” Unlike his friend George Clinton, Sly was unable to manage his drug consumption and stay productive, and he dropped off the grid, becoming homeless at times. According to a documentary seen since this trip, he was reunited with his family but is a shell of his former ebullience.

Two unusual items were in a hallway past this section, both associated with singular guitarman Jimi Hendrix. Along with an instantly recognizable outfit was a “landing card,” those things you have to fill out when you fly into a foreign country or return from international travel. His, completed for Heathrow in London weeks before his death, listed his occupation as “Musician” and a hotel as his English residence. But I was especially taken with a ticket from the Monterey (Calif.) Pop Festival of 1967, at which Jimi established his lasting fame. The concert has additional fame from the poor choice of security guards made by the organizers: members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who ended up whaling on concert-goers.

After completing this section, I hit the lunch area back on the entry floor. On this entire trip I only bought a few lunches, and two were a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato bisque, the only vegetarian option at the Hall of Fame. With a soda in Twin Falls, Idaho, the combo was $6. At the HOF with a bottled tea, it was over $20.

Getting the more expensive version was a bit difficult. You walk past a long counter behind which people are making food, none of whom look at you. Around the corner I came up to a young woman who looked as lost as I was, and when I asked, she said she didn’t know where to order. I didn’t either, I reassured her. But finally I noticed an “Order Here’ instruction to the side of the digital menu above a different part of the counter—which I had looked at without seeing that part. An old-fashioned cardboard sign seems called for here, especially since a couple arriving behind us was equally confused. I sent the young woman ahead of me. The wife of the couple stepped up behind her, and the man pointed me out. “That’s very polite of you,” I said, and he remarked that the setup was confusing.

Tables were full, so I chose the counter with single seats along a glass wall, overlooking a marina. Unfortunately it was above the air conditioning vents, too, so I froze. At least the expensive food was good, though not three times better than that in Twin Falls.

After escalating back down, I escalated up to the music-making level. “The Garage” had various setups, where apparently you could play along with famous musicians. Plus, there was a setup for a full band, occupied by an apparent family surrounded by supportive onlookers. I looked for congas to try out, but sadly there were none. I find this a remarkable oversight.

Around the corner was a remarkable artifact, in an exhibit about Les Paul, one of the inventors of the solid-body electric guitar. That’s it on the right. I mean, the picture on the right—not the guitar on the right! It’s the two-by-four on the left, which he called the “Plank,” from around 1940. He first tried a chunk of railway track, the exhibit said, but realized that was far too large for anyone to lug around. The guitar is an early Les Paul, though. The point to a solid body was to isolate the sound of the strings, without the wood affecting it. Out of the shot on the left is the early amplifier Paul built from his parents’ radio.

Along the last wall before the next escalator were other sundry items, including, finally, a conga, from the rock group Deep Purple.

Upstairs was a gallery of exhibits from the most recent inductees to the Hall, in 2022. One was a bit controversial… for the inductee! Dolly Parton herself questioned why a country singer with some crossover to the pop charts belonged in a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She said during voting, “I don’t feel that I have earned that right,” and she “must respectfully bow out.” It didn’t work: She was voted in anyway. She provided a red dress that showed off her absurd combination of tiny waist and huge bosom, which I feel comfortable commenting on only because I’ve heard her say much the same. Not being into country, I am far more a fan of her than of her music, though I find “Jolene” haunting. And no one who has worked in a corporate office could hate “9 to 5”—the song, or the movie she wrote it for and acted in, a 1980 comedy about three females who get fed up with their sexist boss and kidnap him.

I was more thrilled to see a nearby reel-to-reel tape recorder. A duo known as The Eurythmics was a major sensation in the 1980s. Their early hits were recorded somewhat DIY on this recorder, which I learned from an exhibit panel and which explained why a reel-to-reel was featured in the video for their breakout song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These).” The exhibit didn’t say whether the recorder was that recorder.

The actual Hall of Fame is a bit of a letdown. Each inductee is only represented by a small square with the shape of the trophy given them and the inductees’ signature, all etched into what I took to be metal but was protected by glass, so I couldn’t be sure. The Hallway was far too narrow—I can only assume the architect assumed, wrongly, that people wouldn’t dally here with so much else to do. I would have lingered, but couldn’t stand the human density.

My escape was doubly rewarded, because along with more air, I got a look at a sparkly dress worn by Tina Turner. Like most of my generation, I first knew of Turner through “Proud Mary.” Rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival had a 1969 hit with the ballad about a Mississippi riverboat, but two years later Turner and her husband Ike blew it up into a hard-driving R&B hit. I went nuts for it. Later the news came out that he abused her for years. By then Tina had left him and become a phenomenon on her own. I had the massive pleasure of seeing her in concert in the late ’80s in Pullman. I earned some extra bucks on occasion as a techie at the WSU coliseum, loading in and out shows and/or the basketball court. Working both ends of her show, I was allowed to watch from the back. I was not a huge fan of her solo song choices, but the energy of her live performance was a musical tornado like I’ve never seen before or since. This little sliver of a dress was quintessential Tina.

One other stunner on this floor graced a wall near the escalator like an unforgettable afterthought. Everything I could say about my personal connection to Prince is the same thing any of his fans would say. His early demise provided as much a sense of despair for the future music we lost as from the tragedy of his death. I needed no placard to tell me this was his guitar, but I was still thrilled to read it was built for the “Purple Rain” tour and used for many others.

Level 5 brought more jaw-droppers, like Michael Jackson’s red leather jacket with black V stripes from the music video that changed vids into an art form, “Thriller” from the 1983 album. Much as I enjoyed the music and the dance, special joy came from hearing the voice of Vincent Price featured. Price was a horror-movie star through the middle of the 20th Century. As a tween I would wake up early on Saturday mornings to watch a local broadcast of old horror flicks, and his were a favorite. The special effects were strictly “B” grade if that, but his presence brought class to the genre, and to the song. Michael I grew up with, in the sense that I was a fan of the Jackson 5 from their first hit around the time I was watching the Price movies. Never, it seems, was there so great a talent so utterly unprepared psychologically for fame and riches.

You might be surprised that a flute is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Like many fans of Jethro Tull, I did not initially realize the man playing a flute in a progressive rock band was not named Jethro Tull. That was the made-up name of the band; the flautist was Ian Anderson. Their breakout 1976 album, “Thick as A Brick,” was a single song. I learned here it was meant to be a parody of the high-concept albums bands had been bringing out since the Beatles' “Sergeant Pepper” in 1968, with Brick supposedly written by an eight-year-old. I just knew I loved the inherent joy of the piece, not to mention the contrast of a flute against the standard instruments of the rock world. The instant I saw a flute and its case across the room, I knew it had to be Anderson’s.

More guitars from far too many names to comprehend appeared around various corners: Kurt Cobain of Nirvana; one used by Bob Dylan and by Robbie Robertson of The Band; Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead; and a bass version from Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.

Floor 5 came with a warning label, saying some content was graphic. The room had four stage setups behind glass, but none of the content was NSFW.7 Not Suitable for Work. Maybe on the videos, which I didn’t watch? I took a few moments to look over the surprisingly large collection of foot controls used by Eddie Van Halen, not that I had any idea what any of them did.

That done, I was done, and emotionally worn out, and very, very, happy. It had taken less than three hours, but seemed far fuller. I rode the escalators down reluctantly, and found myself disgorged into, of course, the gift shop. There was zero chance of my buying anything, knowing stuff does not make one happy, and this stuff was all going to be overpriced. Perhaps delaying the inevitable exit, I thought I’d indulge my curiosity by looking around, and that was how I spotted the rack with long-sleeve tee shirts for $10! They were from the previous year’s induction class. I read now, from the back of the white one I picked out, the aforementioned Dolly Parton and Eurythmics, Pat Benatar, Duran Duran, Eminem, Lionel Ritchie, Carly Simon, and the preternaturally smooth Harry Belafonte. Buying it proved a minor adventure, in that I tried to pay in cash and found it abjured. At first I thought the dude was joking, but, you know, yeck breath.

Finally I made my way outside and caught a bus, not really difficult given that it wasn’t moving. This was the tour bus of Johnny Cash. A placard outside explained that he bought it in 1979, had it customized, and used it for his final 20 years on the road. The death of his wife, star-in-her-own-right June Carter Cash, made it untenable for him to keep. He sold it two months later—and died himself another two months after that. I understand. If I ever had to sell the Purple Sage, it would break my heart, too.

I wandered down to the waterfront marina above which I’d sat for lunch, toward a massive ore ship I presumed was part of the children’s museum along the pier. A 30-foot sailboat was maneuvering between it and the marina entrance. At first I thought it was using its motor with sails up in the tight space, but then realized, no, the captain was impressively working under sail alone with little wind.

I was up the ship gangway before I saw the sign with the price of admission. I wasn’t willing to pay it, in part because of allure of the submarine moored by the parking lot where I’d left the Sage.

Japan drew the United States into World War II through a surprise air raid on the Navy base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. Those planes were carried the better part of 4,000 miles to get there, which makes the point that much of the fighting in the “Pacific Theatre” of the war was fought on the Pacific Ocean. Not only was taking down war vessels important, so was destroying the civilian and military vessels that supplied the bases that supplied those ships. You might recall the effectiveness numbers for submarines from the museum out in Washington State. According to a brochure about the U.S.S. Cod, submariners—do you remember how to pronounce that?—caused 55% of Japanese ship sinkings with only 1.6% of the U.S. Navy’s humans. More than 1,100 freighters and 200 naval ships were sunk.

The United States had virtually no submarine force on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, most of those World War I leftovers. The Cod was part of the massive restructuring of American industry that saw plants shift to radically different products within months. Launched just 15 months after Pearl, it made seven voyages of destruction. Now it’s a museum maintained by volunteers.

Just so you’re fairly warned, I am totally going to geek out for paragraphs to come. I’d been in a sub before, but I remain fascinated by the people who are willing to serve their country packed into a sardine can.

Up the gangplank, you walk along the slatted deck past the conning tower to the forward hatch. I don’t know why I found it fascinating to look through the gaps of the deck to the hull rounding away. At the front of said tower, the deck gun returned a childhood memory. My mother wisely tried to distract me from the anniversary of my father’s death by taking me and my best friend Tommy Herbert to Wilmington, N.C., for the weekend. The two of us played on a gun hanging off the side of the U.S.S. North Carolina, a battleship of the same era as the Cod. On turning around to climb back to the deck, I spotted Mother leaning against the rail in her coat on an unusually cool September day. Even my self-involved 11-year-old brain processed how sad and lonely she looked.

I stopped long enough to take in the bullet hole left by a Japanese plane in August 1945 before dropping into the entry visible just in front of the gun cage in the previous picture. I presume this was used for loading supplies, a slightly larger hole in the side of the vertical tube used by the frogmen as an airlock when the sub was underwater. A steep set of stairs provides slightly easier access for civilians, to my disappointment. At least I got to use the last few rungs straight down into the forward torpedo room. Going back to get this shot created an awkward moment. As I swung the camera up, I found my eyes following a shapely pair of feminine legs into her shorts. I stepped back and looked away as the young woman slowly stepped down, followed by her apparent date, given the conversation one couldn’t help but hear moving through those close quarters.

Normally, the Cod’s brochure suggests, there would have been torpedoes carried in the six forward tubes along with ten spares. A cutaway of one to show the insides hung on the right, demonstrating that it mostly held air! That was combined with alcohol and water to create the steam that drove the propeller.

I don’t know which was more affecting: The power represented by the torpedo tubes…

Or the sleeping spaces in the same room:

And by the way, the enlisted men often slept in shifts, so you couldn’t even claim this much space as your own.

The lidless toilet shoved into a sliver barely wide enough to accommodate it came with three paragraphs of operational instructions on a bronze plaque. These covered the different valves to work before and after one’s personal business, using either air or a pump depending on the sub’s operational mode. The museum had stuffed an old copy of Life Magazine behind a pipe, a nice touch. This turned out to be the officers’ toilet.

The officer’s mess was the size of a small breakfast table, with bench seats one had to slide into. The junior officers had their own room—the size of a mid-sized walk-in closest, nearly filled by the metal wardrobe and three berths. Small touches of home included a metal turntable and a shortwave radio. Only the captain got his own space, just long enough to fit the bed and barely wide enough to get out of it. At his feet were a compass and depth gauge. These rooms were amidst 126 over-sized batteries providing electricity for the boat.8 I’m purposely using “boat” instead of “ship.” So I was trained by attendees of a submarine training center then in Orlando, who were fellow students at my first martial arts school.

The control room was bathed in red light, as it was during wartime night operations, so the eyes of guys who had to go outside adjusted quickly to the dark. This made me think about the fatigue these people must have suffered. From my lighting design days, I know red is the hardest color for our brains to process, so much so that it stops processing it after a while. Seeing the Christmas tree and wheels like those in the museum Jack and I visited in situ was fun.

Sadly, one is not allowed into the conning tower, where the action would be during combat. I climbed partially up the ladder and tried to get a picture by shooting blind with the camera held at arm's length, but it didn’t come out. A dad a bit younger than me and his late-teens son were on the boat when I arrived, and we moved through at roughly the same pace without interacting. As I was coming down, the dad said, “Is that the way out?” His volume and tone were such that I wasn’t sure which of us he was talking to, or whether I was supposed to hear it. My sense was he was trying to be a busybody and correct me for going up. I pointed out the sign saying you could go halfway. “Oh,” was all he had to say.

The next compartment reminded me of my sister. When you start complaining about how small your kitchen is, think of this one. Arabelle isn’t a complainer. She just did amazing things feeding her family from an undersized space.)

This tiny kitchen fed 100 men three times a day. George Sacco was a cook onboard in 1945. His write-up on the experience was displayed on a small panel on a table in the mess. “A typical meal aboard COD used 60 lbs. of beef, pork, or fish, or up to 125 lbs. of turkey or chicken, 45 lbs. of fresh potatoes, or 5-1/2 lbs. of dehydrated potatoes, four gallons of water and dry milk, and four Number 10 cans… of vegetables. If a certain meal was popular, we would increase the amount of the entree by 10 to 20 lbs.” That’s one meal, people, all prepared in a closet. A week’s menu was as varied as it could be under the circumstances, but certainly would’ve gotten repetitive on a long patrol.

Sacco—that’s him in the lower left corner of the pic—provided entrée into a bit of food history. “I also introduced many COD crewmen to their first taste of pizza when I baked pizzas on Saturday nights at sea.” With pizza so predominant in modern American culture, you may be surprised to hear the first one wasn’t sold in the U.S. until 1905, and pizzerias were mostly confined to the Northeast as of World War II. This makes some sense, given that immigration by Italians was limited by law. The cuisine spread after the war, in part because of soldiers learning about it in Italy and men like Sacco spreading the taste.

I’m not sure why Sacco and the brochure and signage spelled COD in all-caps. The boat was named for the fish, so it’s not an acronym. Even the museum’s website spells it both ways.

Another potential complaint-stopper about your life was the single waist-high washing machine for 100 people. On the forward wall of the next room were two tanks that distilled seawater into drinking and washing water.

Aft of this was a somewhat roomier bunkhouse:

The brochure says 54 men slept here—in 36 bunks. As far as I could tell, they shared two sinks. Everything I’ve described since the galley was also surrounded by more batteries.

Next up were the two engine rooms. A modern $750,000 street-legal Ferrari with a V-12 engine produces about 1,000 horsepower. The Cod had four 1,600-hp engines, running on diesel. But those engines didn’t spin the propellers. The exhaust needs to go somewhere. So they ran only when the ship was on the surface, driving four large generators which in turn ran the props’ electric motors, and recharged the batteries for undersea use.

Beyond these was the maneuvering room, with the set of levers used to control the propellers, which doubled as the machine shop.

In the aft torpedo room, laminated signs told the story of the only Cod crew member to die during the war. In April 1945 the boat was on the surface one night in rolling seas near China, then under Japanese control. During routine maintenance on a torpedo, explosive gas built up in this room, and a spark set off a fire. Two of the torpedoes took flame. Crewmen trained as firefighters put one out, but couldn’t the other, so they tried to load it into a tube to shoot it out of the ship. Meanwhile, two other men ran out on deck to open the rear hatch. If the torpedo proved too hot to handle, the watertight door to the room would be closed and the sub would simply dive to drown the room.

Unfortunately, a wave washed the men overboard, Quartermaster Lawrence Foley and Seaman Andrew Johnson. Men rushed up through the hatches to look for them, the captain chancing to use the spotlight. Apparently in the emergency the pair had not taken the time to put on life jackets. Foley swam in those heavy seas for seven hours, trying to help Johnson, but Johnson only made it six before sinking in exhaustion to his sea-floor grave.

Among a small collection of artifacts in the torpedo room, two caught my eye. The first was impossible to miss: a pink periscope. That’s right, I said pink. It seems somebody got the brightly colored idea that pink would be hard to spot from a distance. They were wrong.

The other was a much smarter idea: a hole-y bag with a rock in it. This was the very high-tech manner of preventing classified documents from falling into enemy hands in the event of the sub getting captured. Toss ’em in the bag, and toss it overboard.

Somewhere along this tour I uttered the words recorded in my notebook, “I could not have been a submariner.” I confess a brief moment of claustrophobia when the young couple blocked me from getting out of the galley. Again, small spaces are okay. Feeling trapped in small spaces does not work for me.

Unfortunately, I got one more chance to experience this before I could leave. Starting up the ladder, I found myself looking up a woman’s dress. Fortunately for both of us, she was wearing tights. She turned out to be older, and took a very long time to come in what was supposed to be the exit. With her nearly in full view and searching for the next rung, I said, “Two more.” When done, I joked about the luck of the tights, but she seemed oblivious to my point. She launched into something about how she and (name of husband as if I knew who that was) were going to (some event I was apparently supposed to recognize) and… I had tuned her out by then. Her husband became my hero when he popped down the ladder and landed with a final jump, despite being in his 70s, and gave me a nod. I gathered he was an ex-submariner and museum volunteer.

Off the gangplank, I paused to appreciate the Cod’s “scoreboard.” Painted on the side of the conning tower were six red circles (suns) with rays, symbolizing Japanese warships sunk, including a submarine-hunting destroyer; around 20 suns on white backgrounds for merchant ships; a boat representing small vessels and the numeral 26; and an out-of-place martini glass. That last represented a unique place in history occupied by the Cod. Three months after Seaman Johnson lost his life, a submarine from the Netherlands ran aground on a reef in Japanese-held waters. The Cod came to the rescue and, after attempts to pull the Dutch free failed, took on its crew. I cannot imagine the conditions inside for 152 men after three days. The brochure says this “was the only international sub-to-sub rescue in history.” It seems the Dutch eventually threw a helluva thank-you party.

The last artifact was the last “World War II torpedo crane truck” still operating anywhere, according to the brochure, with a real practice torpedo from the day:

I had one more important drive-by to make on the way out of town, but the sub being at the edge of downtown, I wanted to at least get a look at Cleveland proper. Through luck or instinct, I managed to wind my way right to the main drag, Superior Avenue. A right and a few blocks brought me to the Public Square at the center of town without trying. I drove the counter-clockwise-only route around the park, noting what appeared to be a wedding party posing for informal shots in front of the civic center. The Soldiers’ & Sailors’ Monument honoring the county’s Civil War veterans was tempting, but sneaking a look online while stuck at stop lights told me I couldn’t go to the top. So I popped my next destination into MapQuest and followed it east on a very personal mission.

(Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) I mentioned friend Steve Charry a number of times. He grew up in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland burb, because of his father’s rather high-profile job. One of the most revered classical music conductors in American history is George Szell of the Cleveland Orchestra. Szell’s assistant conductor was Michael Charry. Michael went on to lead the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, teach for years at a prestigious conducting program in New York City, and write the definitive biography of Szell. I’ve lost touch with the family, so it is with trepidation that I check the Internet… and am delighted to see he is still teaching at the Mannes School, as of Spring Semester 2024. MQ swung me by for a look at elegant Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra since 1931. My achingly missed friend Steve, a recorded boy soprano, had been there, and now, so had I.

On the way I added another university campus to the trip, Cleveland State. I didn’t take the time to swing through, but what I saw had the usual vibe of an urban school, like New York University.

Having booked my hotel in the airport parking lot, I turned off MQ and location services and made my way northeast. Eventually I’d run into a major thoroughfare headed north to pick up I-90, I figured. I’m glad this turned into a longer climb through lower-income neighborhoods, showing some of the typical problems but also the diversity and areas of small businesses making a go. Someone with a food tent set up in one of these districts had the Ohio Players blaring, an obscure song I love, “I Want to be Free.” Not only did the Players produce my all-time favorite dance song, “Fire,” I had just seen some of their outfits at the HOF.

A final hour-and-a-half of driving, paralleling the out-of-sight Lake Erie shoreline, brought me back to Erie, Penn. For a number of years I had a pretty good streak of spending New Year’s Eve in different locales—at last count, 14 states, 21 locales, and two countries. One of those came in 1990, when I was living in a suburb of Rochester, and disappeared to Erie just to add another state to the New Year’s list. This time I entered from the southwest and took US 20 to arrive at the Glass House Inn, the last classic single-story motel of the trip. It wrapped on three sides around its parking lot, which in turn wrapped around the swimming pool.

Inside the small office I met a middle-aged East Indian woman, clearly a co-owner, who came out of a back area from which sounds of a younger child bubbled. As we did the usual, I asked where in India she was from. She said Gujarat, a state in the northwestern part of the country near the Arabian Sea and Pakistan. Reserved at first, she perked up when I told her I’d been to India, asking where. After I gave the answers you heard in Spokane, she said India was on the rise. I agreed, noting how impressed I have been with the software engineers I’ve worked with. But then she praised the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. ‘If you like Hindu fascists,’ I thought, extricating myself quickly.

After loading in, I returned to 20 headed for an Indian restaurant, nothing else online looking both veg-friendly and not overly expensive. It was a longer backtrack than I preferred, though. When I spotted the cute-looking Public House Pub, Restaurant, and Bottle Shop on the corner of a small retail strip, its large windows open, I circled back. I was shown to a high-top table where I could face the door from behind the host station, the perfect gunfighter seat.

The company has a craft brewery, also, but sadly offered nothing dark. I asked the server for recommendations, and she explained shyly that she was 19 and couldn’t make any. But, she said, I could just go around the fern-topped wall to the bottle shop cooler and pick something out. I came back to the table and asked for a Mountain Pie S’mores Dessert Stout from Butler (Penn.) Brew Works, which turned out to be sweet but surprisingly light.

Business was steady but light, so she asked how my day had been in a tone that invited actual conversation. I told her of the HOF, of course. She said she hadn’t been, but had been to a Hard Rock Cafe. “In the right direction,” I teased, and she grinned. I got a meal in a bowl: various grains including sunflower seeds, Asian noodles, fresh spinach, red and yellow pepper strips, and cranberries, incredibly healthy and absolutely delicious. Meal and beer and ambiance and service and a nice chat with the manager about the beer cost a very reasonable $24.

Too bad I only get to Erie every 34 years, or I would definitely go back.