| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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The idea is to make this a pleasant place to walk on a lunch break from shopping in the city or from a trying office job.
There is a small museum inside. They have examples of ads from before the Civil War including one with the following newspaper ad: 'STOP THE RUNAWAY! Left my service at the mouth of Dog River on Monday morning the 23rd inst. About four o'clock A.M. my Negro slave HENRY: He is 22 years of age, very black, a smiling countenance and considered very likely---From information derived from other Negros since Henry's desertion, I have no doubt but that it is his intention to get himself smuggled if possible, on River Bar. Masters and owners of vessels are therefor particularly requested to observe he does not secret himself with the cargo. A liberal reward will be paid for Henry's apprehension and delivery to me, at the mouth of Dog River, or secured in Mobile Jail. E. Montgomery' I hope Henry got away. As for the fort, there is no point in calling it a fort any more. It has become a chic street decoration. What a thing to do.
After that we hit the big event of the day, Battleship Memorial Park. This is a military museum really. The U. S. S. Alabama was saved from the scrap and docked here so that Alabamans could see it. Right behind it is a submarine, the U. S. S. Drum. You can tour each.
The tour of the U. S. S. Alabama is really complete. It is hard to imagine that there are nooks or crannies that one of the three pieces of the tour does not pick up. The tour is broken in thirds, each of which starts and ends in an easily accessible place, so they call them three tours, but really they form one long walking tour. You see just about everything from engines to latrines, the kitchen, the ice cream parlor, the dentists' office, the mess hall, navigation and plotting rooms, even where the film projector is stored for the nightly movie. It's the whole enchilada. There is a lot of climbing and going down steps. Most of the ship is hot though every once in a while you pass where they are piping in a cool breeze. The final part of the tour is the upper decks including gun emplacements and the bridge. And for most of the way they pipe in big band dance music. The Alabama is 680 feet long and 108 feet wide.
Between the two boats we stopped at the Aircraft Pavilion where they have ten aircraft or so on display including an SR-71 Blackbird. (They have it under a more generic name: an A-something.)
Finally we went through the Drum, 311.7 feet long, 27.3 feet wide. You enter at the fore and walk pretty much the length. You can climb up the conning tower and look through the periscope. You walk through the engine room, the mess room, etc.
Then off to Montgomery. In the car we put on a cassette of The Scarlet Pimpernel. It has nothing to do with the South, but it passes the time. The weather which had been quite hot then cooled off for a day or so is back as hot as ever. It must be hard living under such heat all the time. I think we have lost much of the humidity though. We are in a way from the Gulf.
We get to Montgomery and check into the Super 8. Then we go up and down the road looking for a good place to eat. Amazingly enough every restaurant we see we have a really good idea what it is like. That is because the restaurants we see are exclusively national chains. McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Arby's Roast Beef, Pizza Hut. There is a place called Omelet House. That's a new restaurant to me. I got here too late and it has died. I guess the name is just not familiar enough. People were not sure to ten decimal places what the food was like. How can they expect to survive? We went to Taco Bell. I have a Chili-Cheese burrito and a taco. They have a new sauce in their little packets. They call it 'Fire' level sauce. I know what you are expecting me to say. That it is not hot enough. Not so. (Well, it would be true and yes, I would like it hotter. But that is not my point.) What is interesting is that there is demand for hotter sauces. The country is getting better in this regard. People like their food spicier. That's good. I don't know if we are getting a different ethnic mix, if people are getting more sophisticated, or if people are more health-conscious. (Yes, spicy food is healthy. So to some extent is chocolate, but spicy food is more so.) Our local grocery stores even have hot sauces we used to have to order by mail.
Well, back at the room we watch some Agatha Christies on Arts & Entertainment. I think they lean more to the entertainment side and less arts. They never show operas any more.
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09/09/97--Tuskegee and Montgomery, Alabama: Historical buildings and Civil Rights sites:
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Well, tonight we will be two-thirds of the way through the trip. The days seem to be going a lot faster now. Of course, we still have nearly two weeks to go.
I had strange dreams of which only the words 'mango pie' remain. I have never heard of mango pie, but I suppose there is no reason you couldn't have it. A mango is pretty much the same consistency as a peach.
I read in a local tour brochure 'Dr. Luther Hill, a local physician, performed one of the world's first successful open-heart surgeries right here in Montgomery.' I am not sure I believe it was one of the first. I bet they are discounting a whole bunch that were successful but did not have high-minded goals.
For breakfast we go to a Shoney's. I guess Shoney is on their own these days. It used to be Shoney's Big Boy. Different places different names seemed to get the Big Boy franchise. They have to find some way to counter-advertise the Taco Bells and Pizza Huts. Their combination sounds pretty tame. So they advertise 'classic American cuisine.' Their menu is still pretty humdrum. Just about everybody here for breakfast is here for the breakfast buffet. I just want to eat simple. Pancakes and syrup. That is probably the healthiest. I would have liked some protein, but it all comes to tightly bound to cholesterol.
This is one of our few gray mornings. We have had good luck this trip. On the way we listen to Public Radio. In Canada they are suing politicians who knowingly lied to their constituents. It sounds like a good idea to me. Of course, I can see how it could end in a great deal of litigation.
They also talked about the intimate connection of smoking and the military. The American military encouraged smoking as a form of recreation getting servicemen hooked. They gave an example where men being exercised were given a break to smoke. If they didn't want to smoke, they were expected to fill the time with push-ups or pull-ups.
It is about a forty-five-minute drive to Tuskegee and the Tuskegee Institute.
The Visitors Center is in a house with parking behind for three cars. They don't get a lot of people at the visitor center. We dropped in to see if there was a tour and were told that You can get that at the Carver Center. It leaves something of a mystery as to why have a visitor center at all. I am not sure what it is for.
We went primarily to see the George Washington Carver Museum. The exhibit starts with a somewhat slow but otherwise good biographical film about the life of Carver. Carver was born a couple of months prior to the opening of the Civil War. He grew up with a fascination with nature and science. He would ask questions like 'if a flower grows from a seed, can you change the seed to change the color of the flower.'
Eventually he came to teach at the Tuskegee Institute. He answered an offer from Booker T. Washington to teach. He got to the Institute to find his laboratory was totally unfunded, he did not even have a room for it. He found that he could get what he needed from waste dumps. He taught that weeds were just valuable plants in the wrong place. He found medicinal purposes for them. Of course, there was the famous work convincing farmers to rotate their crops and to use something that would put nitrogen back into the soil like peanuts. Then he set to work to find applications for the peanut. He found three hundred uses for the nut or its oil, sufficient to make his county the most affluent in the state. He never married, he was married to his work. He rarely cashed paychecks.
The museum has artifacts of his life including large jars of vegetables he grew in conjunction with his research. And they have things like the van he drove as a traveling school. They have a typewriter he used, and also recordings of his voice and that of Booker T. Washington.
They have examples of some of the papers he wrote, most fairly down to earth. They had names like 'How to Grow the Tomato and 115 Ways to Prepare it for the Table' and 'How to Make Sweet Potato Flour, tarch, Sugar Bread, and Mock Cocoanut.'
Following that we drove back to Montgomery. Our destination was the first Confederate White House. Jefferson Davis began to use this house February 21, 1861, and used it for just a few months until that summer when Davis moved to Richmond. The house was not even at its present location but was moved to downtown Montgomery to be a museum. It is a little more resplendent than Beauvoir as his fortunes were somewhat higher when he lived there. I suppose there are some people who can look at the dining room and bedroom that the president confederacy used and think they understand the war better. I still would say that it is only slightly less of a footnote than was Beauvoir. Do I really care about Jeff Davis's tea service? Unlike at Beauvoir the books in the library are relevant to the South and would have at least interested Davis. For example, there was his history of the Confederacy. How would history have been different if that history had found its way to his shelf in 1861? Other books were The South in the Building of the Nation and The Literature of the South. Other artifacts from his life include the Confederate flag from his casket, his backgammon board, a piece of Stonewall Jackson's coat, Coffee cups presented by the Sultan of Turkey, a hat worn habitually by him at Beauvoir, and the pen that signed the Alabama ordinance of secession.
Our next stop was the State Archive and History Museum. They have a nice taped tour of this museum provided free of charge.
It starts with a hall of bronze busts. These are important people from Alabama's history. The ones who were recognizable were the ones whose contribution had something to do with race. I guess most of the rest of Alabama history did not make national news or was of national interest. Evelyn points out the busts involved with race issues are also the newer busts. The state was not honoring Booker T. Washington seventy-five years ago. Now they think he was pretty good.
'Stilled Voices, Forgotten Ways' is an exhibit of the first Alabamans, the Indians. Of course, the tone is very, very sad. These are people we never got a chance to know. By feeling so sad about what happened to the Indians we demonstrate that we are right-feeling people who would never in a million years be involved in hurting the American Indian. We are the ones who want to hear their stilled voices. We even went to see POCAHONTAS and learn about the colors of the wind. Do we want to give back their land to them? Well, no. It's our land now. How about paying higher taxes to make some reparations to the Indians? Sorry, we can't afford that right now. But we do feel bad about those stilled voices. I liked the quote on the tape 'By the time of the arrival of the first European explorers in this area the Indians of the Mississippian had reached the peak of their civilization.' It sounds like they had already peaked out. I think by definition they had reached their peak because they were not allowed to develop any more. So Montgomery mourns the loss of the Indians and Memphis represented freedom to the slaves. |
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