Anne Rodgers Archives

June 18, 2014

Beware Curators with Cookies

My Road Warriorettes have been coming through in a big way. A big box of cookies from Curator Jessica from the Athens County Historical Society and Museum arrived last week. This week it was a package of the best peanut brittle in the world that Anne Rodgers picked up on her way through Marianna, FL., on her move to Texas.

I got a text from Jessica this afternoon: “Awake?” She knows that I am a frequent napper, so she always checks before calling. When I gave her the OK, she made some small talk, then said, “OK, now for the bad news.”

I wondered if she was going to tell me that this sign was for her. I wasn’t looking forward to breaking in a new Curator Jessica. No, it wasn’t that.

No chance to take it easy

Then, I figured we had been turned down for a grant we had applied for. Nope, No news on that front.

“We’re taking down your Friends on Robinson Road exhibit on Monday, and we hoped you had something that we could replace it with.”

The first time I met Curator Jessica, I was about three hours out of Athens when she called to ask if I could pull off a major exhibit on Martin Luther King’s National Day of Mourning in three weeks. I liked her spirit, and we did it.

Three weeks is doable, but three days is stretching it, cookies or no cookies.

A tailor in 1968

We agreed that one that focused on Athens downtown landmarks, particularly where I could contrast photos from the late ’60s and early ’70s with contemporary pictures would be something quick to pull off. That’s why you get to see tailor Frank Richey looking our over Court street on December 21, 1968.

Frank’s building in 2013

Frank is long gone, but the building his shop was in survives.

So, instead of a normal post, you’re going to see a huge data dump of the photos we’re considering. We figure the 100-plus photos here will cut down to about 30 when all is said and done. Not shown are two panoramas I shot last fall. They are going to be almost four feet wide by about 10 inches tall.

Waiting for Anne to call

If I see Anne’s Caller ID show up on my phone, I’m going to be slow to pick up. No telling what she’s going to want me to do for my package of peanut brittle.

Athens, Ohio, photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then navigate through it using your arrow keys.

June 1, 2014

Albany Art Park

All of my Road Warriorettes – Jan, Shari, Anne and Curator Jessica – have different sleep patterns than I do. I’m up until the wee hours of the morning doing blog posts after driving all day. They’re snug in their beds snoring the night away, then they get up early and traipse down to the motel’s free breakfast. I sleep until 9:32, check my email and get rolling just before check-out time. Actually, Shari was the strangest of the batch: she doesn’t come to life until she fills her tank with Starbucks coffee. I’d set the GPS for the nearest Starbucks and leave her a set of keys, hoping she wouldn’t leave me stranded in some backwater town.

Because Anne and Jessica had the early breakfast this morning, they weren’t overly hungry. My hunger alarm was clanging loudly by the time we got to the first town of any size, Albany, Georgia. We had set a goal of avoiding chain joints and had been doing well so far. The first candidate looked a little tea roomy for my taste, so Curator Jessica was dispatched to see if it had tablecloths and/or candles.

I don’t remember if she said it had hanging ferns or not, but we elected to drive around the block to see what else was downtown. When we made the turn, the Albany Artpark on Pine jumped out at us.

At first glance, it was hard to tell if the front windows were painted, if we were looking at reflections or if the colorful images were inside. I put my hunger alarm on snooze.

Fascinating urban art

What we discovered was one of the most innovative uses of an old building I had ever seen. A local organization bought a neglected building, razed the upper floor to make it open to the sky, and beefed up the exterior walls. It became a huge open-air art gallery.

There was such a 3-dimensional feeling to the graffiti art and the surrounding walls that it was hard to tell what was art and what was reality.

We were a day early

The stuff we saw was, for the most part, the equivalent of finger exercises. A formal paint-off was held the day after we were there. News accounts I saw online showed some remarkable work. It’s sort of like the annual chalk street paintings held in Lake Worth, Florida.

Opportunities for other towns

Every place I’ve lived has more than its share of decaying buildings in its downtown areas. I’d love to see art parks like this pop up all over. It’s a great outlet for artists, and the images are fun to look at.

While we were walking around, we visited Ray Charles Plaza, the subject of yesterday’s blog post. We found a great local restaurant on the way of town. It had great food at a reasonable price, served without table cloths, candles or hanging ferns.

Art Park photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

May 30, 2014

Ray Charles Plaza

While we were meandering on back roads to get home to Florida from home in Missouri, one of the Road Warriorettes – I think it was Curator Jessica – spotted a guy playing a piano next to the Flint River in Albany, Georgia. That was worth a U-turn.

Ray Charles is a native son of Albany

Here’s a description of the park and sculpture from a city website:

Albany Georgia, birthplace of Ray Charles, has memorialized the city’s most famous native son with a downtown park that bears his name, airs his music, and features a one-of-a-kind sculpture that is one of only two sculptures in the world that bear the likeness of the legendary blues and jazz singer.

Sculpture plays music

Located in Downtown Albany on Front Street between Oglethorpe Blvd. and Broad Avenue, directly accross the street from Hilton Garden Inn, Ray Charles Plaza, designed by landscape architectural firm Jordan, Jones and Goulding of Norcross Georgia, sits on the bank of the Flint River and gives Riverfront Park visitors the experience of a Ray Charles performance. A revolving, illuminated, bronze statue of Ray Charles seated at a baby grand piano, the work of sculptor Andy Davis, is the park’s centerpiece.

Miniature displayed in visitor center

As water flows down the sides of the statue, music by the legendary blues singer plays on the park’s loudspeakers. Students from Georgia Academy for the Blind assisted Mr. Davis with the design. The students and Mr. Davis also designed a touchable miniature version of the statue that features markings in braille.

The statue is flanked by two walkways designed as keyboards with raised sharps and flats that form benches. The walkways connect to the Albany Riverwalk. The park’s “scenery” includes a large treble clef in the plaza floor and “moonlight in the pines” from the song, Georgia On My Mind. Reflecting Georgia’s longleaf pine forests, the “Moonlight in the Pines” scenery consists of illuminated loblollies, longleaf pines, live oaks and grasses.

Downtown has another attraction that I’ll save for another day.

A Hocking Block

You KNOW you are traveling with a museum curator when she starts jumping up and down all excited at spotting a Hocking block in a walkway in Albany, Georgia. The block came from a brickyard in SE Ohio, not far from where the Athens County Historical Society and Museum is located.

May 21, 2014

Stopping in Clermont

Clermont, with its Citrus Tower and House of the Presidents, has been a stopping point since our family trip in 1960.

It was only logical that the Road Warriorettes Curator Jessica and Bike Partner Anne make a pit stop there on the final leg of our trip.

Built in 1955

A handwritten note on the elevator wall gave some interesting stats. An elevator ride to the top cost us $6 a head. (If Miz Jessica had slouched a little more so she looked like my granddaughter, we could have gotten her the ride for the $4 kid rate, but she’s too honest. There was no senior discount, because EVERYBODY in Florida is a senior.)

A gazillion citrus trees

When the Steinhoffs stood atop the tower in 1960, a sign proclaimed that we were looking out over a gazillion citrus trees, and the smell of orange blossoms washed over us.

When Post reporter Gayle Pallesen and I went up in the tower in 1990 when we were doing a story on U.S. 27 from Little Havana in Miami to Havana, Florida, in the Panhandle, we looked out over a gazillion dead trees killed by a series of disastrous cold fronts that moved through in the ’80s. The only smell was smoke from burning trees that had been bulldozed and piled up.

The landscape today is covered by gazillions of homes and businesses. There is no smell of orange blossoms.

With binoculars or a telephone lens, we could barely make out a square-shaped building on the horizon that we thought was the VAB at Cape Kennedy.

Mineola has been developed nicely

That’s Lake Mineola to the west. A bike trail starting there ties in with the West Orange Trail that goes all the way to Apopka. The development along the lake has done a nice job of integrating the homes into the surrounding hills and making it a very bike / pedestrian / jogger-friendly area. I’d love to sit on one of their porches looking at the sun set over the lake in the evening.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

A little green left

There’s still a little green left to the south. The highway is U.S. 27, which was once the main path to South Florida from the Midwest before I-95 and the Florida Turnpike were built.

The Penny Drop

I told Curator Jessica that I’d spot her a penny to drop over the edge.

“I can’t do that, it might kill someone,” she protested. [She, obviously, hasn’t read the debunking of the penny-dropped-from-the-Empire-State-Building urban legend.)

She and Anne took turns dropping coins down a conduit that goes all the way to the base of the tower. With their ears to pipes on the side of the box, they could hear it spin and ding all the way down. It doesn’t take much to amuse them.

House of Presidents

Southwest of the tower is a large white building looking a little worse for the wear, which is to be expected, because it was here in 1960.

Its website calls it the The Presidents Hall of Fame, but the sign on the front of the building still says House of Presidents. I recalled the tickets were a bit pricy, so we opted to stay on the outside.

“Like a 70’s porn star”

I photographed Anne with Washington and Lincoln behind the wax museum when we passed through in 2013. Miz Jessica, though, made a beeline for Theodore Roosevelt.

“He looks like a 70’s porn star,” she remarked. I wisely opted not to ask about her expertise in that area. I’m sure her interest was purely academic.

She enjoys making period costumes, so Anne and I were edified about the benefits of crotchless pantaloons and why the cancan was such a scandalous dance. Between Jessica and Anne, who wrote Kiss and Tell: Secrets of Sexual Desire from Women 15 to 97, this Missouri boy got quite an education on our road trip.