A Live Bull with 4 eyes, 4 horns and 2 noses

It's weird to remember that there were several oil booms in Pennsylvania. By the time of this trip, all the wells had run dry and a few derricks were left as monuments or curiosities. Ironically, Washington PA is now one of the largest fracking operations in the United States. 

Zanesville Ohio has a very early rust belt tale:

The city grew, with factories making pottery, bricks, glassware, ball-bearings, soap, steel and many others from the 1880s until the mid-1950s. The City had a booming downtown. By the 1950s many factories closed or moved. Pottery, a major employer, slowly lost out to cheaper Asian companies. From the 1950s till the 1980s the City lost about 1/3 of its population. (Wiki)

It looks like the Maramor Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio was quite a place. "Trip nearly ended here!" enthuses my grandfather.

From this website with the history of the restaurant:  

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas may have eaten at The Maramor during their 1934 visit to Columbus. It seems likely that Alice was referring to it when she wrote: “In Columbus, Ohio, there was a small restaurant that served meals that would have been my pride if they had come to our table from our kitchen. The cooks were women and the owner was a woman and it was managed by women. The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women’s cooking can be, but succulent and savoury.”

$2.00 roughly the same as $19 now

I was curious about the noted "lime frosts" from the Maramor, especially interested if they were alcoholic drinks at lunch time, just to get a feel for that. The menu calls the drink a "fresh minted lime freeze," which does sound refreshing for a June day, but it's clearly non-alcoholic. A set of four menus from the Maramor from the 1950's sold for $100 on eBay. If only an entire archive of all these mementos existed in a family attic. I'd be rich. 

A quick stop to visit the birthplace of James Whitcomb Riley. The only observation: white fence. 

And the Shamrock looks like a fairly swanky motel, "- but, $16." 

Very clean city, but lots of colored people, says good old honky grandad, of St. Louis. The racism of my ancestors was a de facto and unprocessed reality. My maternal grandmother called Brazil nuts "n***** toes," even as late as the late '70s. Fewer than three years before this trip, Truman issued the executive order to desegregate the armed forces. Brown v. Board of Education was 3 years in the future. I'm sure my grandfather thought it was respectful and not racist at all to use the phrase "colored people," while being totally unconscious that he found it remarkable in some way that the black population of St. Louis was large. 

It sounds like they had a great time.

It's also interesting that cowboys in cowboy hats featured in the narrative. In a marked way, St. Louis was and is the Gateway. 

Ben Stanley's Cafe on Highway 66:

My maternal grandmother's nickname was Toots. I have no idea why. I remember that my Uncle Bud used to call her that, rather than mom, which seemed funny to me at the time. It looks like she bought some moonshine in the Ozarks. 

The repeated references to Duncan Hines have nothing to do with cake or brownie mixes, but with his early series of publications recommending restaurants and lodging across America. He was the pioneer of this idea in the US, for white people. Black people had the Green Book, first published in 1936, which had an even more important purpose: letting black people know where the safe, non-racist places were to stay or to dine. 

From Wiki:

Hines worked as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printer, and he had eaten many meals on the road across the United States by 1935 when he was 55. At this time, there was no American interstate highway system and only a few chain restaurants, except in large populated areas. Therefore, travelers depended on getting a good meal at a local restaurant. Hines and his wife Florence began assembling a list for friends of several hundred good restaurants around the country.

The book proved so successful that Hines added another which recommended lodging. 

The Will Rogers Memorial was closed. You can sense the disappointment. 

Tulsa Oklahoma, "A clean, modern city." 

The more I dig to find the traces of the lodging and restaurants from 67 years ago, the more it occurs to me that my mother's side of the family definitely had a sense of their class situation. Mid-level but quality lodging (no mention yet of truly swanky hotels) and expensive restaurants, but an eye for "the best" as well as a hint of the delight that comes from "slumming." There's an accounting sheet with every single meal written down, so it will be interesting to check that out. But a grand total of $900 for food and lodging is a huge, huge splurge for 1951. The same purchasing power that about $8000 has now. 

Our intrepid travelers made it to Tulsa, where it starts to feel like the West when I do road trips, in three days. I'm reminded that, in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, published only 12 years before this epic, Bill Wilson refers to Akron Ohio as "a western city."