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Welcome to our 70th monthly Zoom presentation. Another milestone on the journey we embarked on those long days ago of the pandemic.

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We can all be very proud of the amazing library of recordings that we are building. It’s truly a testament to the diversity of the roadside.

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I’m Brian Gallagher, the president of the Society for Commercial Archaeology, and I’m proud to be your host for tonight’s presentation.

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Welcome to all our guests and to any new people we have with us. We’re happy you took the time to watch an SCA presentation, and I hope you enjoy the show.

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For those watching the recording of this episode of the SCA’s monthly presentations, who’s not a member of the SCA.

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We earnestly ask you to consider joining. Funding for the various activities of the SCA comes almost exclusively from our membership. Just visit our website at www.sca-roadside.org.

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and follow the links. Now I have the pleasure of introducing this month’s presenter.

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Author, publisher, artist, Doug Kirby is about to regale us with his talk.

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The Roadside America Project, a taxonomy for travel mirth.

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Get ready for a mesmerizing behind-the-scenes glimpse of 40-plus years decoding the world of offbeat roadside attractions in books, periodicals, websites, and mobile apps.

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These weird set of talents and those are his collaborators on the Roadside America project.

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pioneered a spirit and mythology methodology to love and poke fun at unique attractions.

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We’re about to embark on a fascinating side trip on the borders of good taste through the state of confusion, where giant statues spar for attention.

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tourist traps grip with spring-loaded merch jaws, and everyone sends, wish you were here postcards to their pals back home. Quirky, oddball, wacky, weird. A fever dream of a nation.

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And with that, Doug, would you start sharing your screen? And let’s have your presentation.

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Okay, go ahead, Doug.

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Actually, before I get into the… Before I get into this one, let me let me share my other screen. So I’m going to stop the share here.

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And then I’ll share. the video.

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Here we are. Okay. Hi, everybody. Just going to kind of get you up to speed here.

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With, uh, with a short, about 2-minute video about the Roadside America project.

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Welcome to Felicity, California. I’m the mayor, Jacquel, and today is Outside America Day.

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Okay, Doug, actually, we’re not getting the sound properly. We’re having the same problem we had earlier. Can you press that button that gives us the sound?

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All right, let’s try it once more.

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Oh, we got it.

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Welcome to Felicity, California. I’m the mayor, Jac-Andre Estelle.

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And today, his Outside America Day.

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Okay. Oh my god, that was amazing. So, is that the presentation? You finished now or?

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Yeah, that was let me just. We won’t start him again. Hold on.

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Welcome to Felicity, California.

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Yeah, that was the… that was the opening video. That was a… I made that with all the sites of the week we’ve run since 1996. We have a little teaser image, so I figured, well, there’s like 1,500 of them, how long would it take to show all those?

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Oh my god, that’s amazing.

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All right. Let me jump over to the, uh… the Powerpoint now, and.

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go with that.

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getting rid of all right. So. Let’s see if we get this up.

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There you go. That looks great.

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Okay, so.

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This talk is going to move a little slower than that video, but it’s moving pretty fast. So I really, as I was putting this together, realized that I could I could devote.

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a whole talk to pretty much any one slide I’ve got in here, so I’m gonna be skimming through some things. I’ve got some visuals to go with them. Couple notes. There’s a, um… A mix of human art, since I am a cartoonist, and AI art that I’ve been experimenting with recently and use some of it in the talk. And so I thought, as a service to everybody and for transparency, I’d put a badge up in the corner.

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And it’s either gonna indicate that it’s 100% human, 50-50 collaboration, or 20 human 80 AI, where the AI is really having, you know, maybe the better ideas than the human was having.

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So those are marks. And then there also might be an agentic talk scold that will try to heckle me during my presentation. So just be be watching for that. He might be helpful.

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see if I can get this to. Okay. So these are just some of the milestones for the Roadside America project. The team of us have been writing, designing and publishing since 1985.

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Uh, we’ve… the first book came out in 86.

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next big milestone was a cross-country road trip, and then the website in 96. So we’ve got a 40th and a 30th anniversary happening this same year.

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And 2009, first mobile app and currently we have about 22,000 points of interest we’re tracking.

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Uh, this is the original book team, uh… Ken Smith, who’s, I believe is on the call, uh, is the principal writer these days of the site, and a lot of the material we use. And Mike is still involved with the project.

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All three of us still love to do these things and go to these places. Jack Barth, who is part of the original team, uh, he exited after the first book, but he did a few roadside-adjacent projects.

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Um, in the following years and we’re still friends with Jack. And then Susan Kirby, my wife, she’s really the business brains of the operation. And, you know, she stays on top of all the marketing and.

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Uh, PR and corporate aspects of everything we do, because, you know, we… we just are bad at that stuff. And she’s great at it, so… Um, oh, and I just have two examples here of projects. Ken did a great book about mental hygiene, educational films from the 1950s.

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Uh, really fun to read. And Mike, who’s also done a lot of things, uh, I think the thing he’s going to be remembered for more is this, um.

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license plate project he had back as we were releasing the first Roadside America and it’s called Preamble. It’s made of vanity license plates from each of the 50 states that spells out the preamble of the Constitution. It’s still in the museum and.

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You can buy it, you know, a puzzle, a 500-piece puzzle, or a 1,000-piece puzzle with N on it. So that’s pretty cool.

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The origins, the way we came from different places. Some our origins are doing satire and college humor magazines in the 70s and 80s.

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Mike and Jack came from Stanford. Chad, the Stanford Chaparral. Ken and I were from Venu, which was a Glassboro State College. It was a humor magazine that was sort of a little out of place because.

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None of the other state colleges had them, and it seemed like we were in the company of the Ivy League schools, which always seemed to have, you know, decades or 100-year-old traditional magazines in place.

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Um, so, you know, we would do things that are… were fun, sort of a mix of journalism and humor.

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And it’s… and this… okay, this is the agentic talk telling me to move along, so… Um, then, from there, all of us started to gravitate, uh, McKenna and I and Mike and Jack and other people, smart, creative talents from across the United States, you know, getting out of school, and we started collaborating on all kinds of interesting projects, books.

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Radio, live comedy, um, there was a magazine called the American Bystander that did one issue then. It was revived by fans of it.

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In 2016, and it’s now… it’s like a legitimate, great humor magazine with all kinds of great writing and cartoonists working on it.

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But back then, we get to participate in the starting one, which was done by, uh… led by Brian McConaughey, who, if anybody is a National Lampoon fan, they may remember his name.

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And that was really fun to work with him and for this dream of a magazine that then took obviously much longer to be realized.

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We also were doing things like for the bystander, I had to write a story. I wrote a story about spelunking, which is a hobby that I had at the time.

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And why people like to spelunc, so this is one of the photos from that. It was actually based on a photo of.

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A friend of mine in high school had done for when I had a high school newspaper that I worked on.

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Um… And, okay, so he’s bored.

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The when we went to to try to get this thing published, you know, the reaction to the publishing industry was kind of lukewarm. They there weren’t really these kind of quirky attraction guides. Then there were just mainstream travel guides.

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Uh, and the kind of places we were going to write about were shunned by the State Tourism Bureau’s, um, and they tended to be, you know, like a local offbeat story might appear in a newspaper. The publishers didn’t see the market, and in fact, um, there’d been some book about diners or something that they all told us about.

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That didn’t sell well, so it was like the blockade, like, well, is this like the diner book?

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Um, and I don’t know what diner book it was, or I probably shouldn’t say it if I did. But anyway, we had a… we ended up with a great editor who managed to push Simon & Schuster into taking the risk with us, and we did that book in, uh.

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1980, we did the research in 85, the book came out in 86.

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Uh, we all had backgrounds and childhood memories of family vacations on the road. My parents would pack their five kids into a station wagon, you know, for towing a camp trailer, and, uh, you know, we would… we would go to these sort of interesting places, so, uh, and, you know, here’s a shot of my dad before I was born. He was already traveling to these places with my mom. He had a 60mm camera, so we have a family archive of these films of, uh.

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home movies and vacations. And he would plan… he had a regular job, but he’d plan out his 3 or 4 weeks of vacation every year for, like, these mega road trips. He’d ride away for all the tourism bureau information and collect it, and plot it out on a paper map.

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And then we were off on the road and my brother Jay and I would tend to be the, you know, the co-pilot navigators and trying to convince them to pull off to.

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uh, interesting places. I mean, this is one place, I think… this was my dad’s idea to stop at Dealy Plaza, and it’s because JFK was assassinated there.

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four years earlier, but it was still a place that if you were driving through Dallas, how could you do that on a vacation and not stop at the Texas School Book Depository?

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Um, the… back when we did this stuff originally, and I know it sounds like grandpa complaining about the time before, you know, television or something, but there was no internet, no easy research, uh, nobody.

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you couldn’t go to the library and get this stuff, you couldn’t… there were no ways to gather the information other than sort of in the traditional ways. Now, Mike had a huge collection of postcards. I had postcards from my family trips.

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And, uh, Ken was just saying to me the other day, he and Mike had to plot out a lot of their big two-month trip on that first summer using the postcards, and they… he said it was pretty inefficient, because a lot of the places.

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just didn’t exist anymore. So, uh… but, you know, enough of them did that we were able to cobble that together.

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into the book. We also, along with other research, you know, accumulated the travel brochures, all the travel ephemera, you know, gas station maps.

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Uh, sometimes would have notations of interesting places. And, you know, we relied on humors, rumors of places that others would recall. A lot of times they get the state wrong, the name wrong. But, you know, it would be a lead to get us towards something like, oh, this is where.

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you know, this was the repairman for the house on the Rock, or, you know, it would be some… something where we would eventually figure out where we should go.

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Um, and Ken was also reminding me that sometimes they get to a place like they were looking for llama land and it was gone, but they happened to look at a local mural, and there was a little notation for a place called the Flying Paperboy of the Guadalupees.

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So, it, uh, you know, it was that kind of serendipity that led us to a lot of the weird places we included in our books.

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the… This is, uh… well, this is AI, obviously, but, um, you know, the twine ball is something that it’s fun to look at. You can pull your car up and just take a picture of it, but you also want to know the story, like, why would somebody do this? Why would somebody.

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You spend their life, uh, winding a giant ball of twine, making it so large that you couldn’t move it easily. Um, and so we, you know, we were really interested in how, um.

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All this stuff came to be, and why certain things survived and certain things didn’t. We had to… sort of a love of stilted humor, brochures and bumper stickers, billboards, oversaturated color, you know, anything where a claim would be over promising what was actually going to be delivered. And, you know, we wanted to understand why.

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The small towns seem to have a shared DNA that made them want to build crazy things or, you know, sort of be proud of a particular thing that you wouldn’t maybe think, you know, are you really proud of that?

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Um, or was it just a business decision to promote something?

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The and again, this is AI. This is my notion of what the map looked like when we started the project. It was had a lot of craters in it. We didn’t know what was out there.

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It seems sort of savage and wild, like, you know, a new world that we were going to explore.

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It really required us to get out on the road and do it. So we hit the road, uh, and… Started to look at these places, it, uh… you know, you’d see something like House on the Rock, which…

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is somewhat was somewhat obscure at the time, but, you know, then we find out there’s something called rock in the house, you know, a house that a giant boulder rolled down the hill and demolished.

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So, you know, we were trying to look for those things, those connections where there were things like, yeah, you saw this, but you didn’t notice this over around the corner.

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And as we did this, you know, we didn’t go to school for this. We were, you know, going to school for other things back in college, but.

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Uh, it really sort of starts to fit into a curricula of.

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different topics, so many different things that relate to becoming an expert on this stuff. We also had some editorial views that we decided would be the right way to do this, so we wouldn’t be doing what other authors maybe had done.

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Um, and we started with the idea that we were unapologetic tourists, that, um, you know, these places are built for our entertainment and to convince us to, you know, open our wallets and, uh, you know, they want to make some money, some of them, some of them just want to tell their story.

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And we wanted to, uh… we wanted to dispel that notion that the best travel is only the travel where you get the authentic experience with the locals, and you get this feeling that, like, you’re… you’re in there, you’re almost like a local, when you really aren’t, you know, you’re just, you know, try wearing your tourist skin, in this case, and then just look for everything to be, um…

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A fascinating revealing, fun, and, you know, it seemed like an enjoyable way to do it. We didn’t… we didn’t like the idea of going into places where you might, um, want to debunk it. You know, we didn’t… why debunk it? It’s like, if the, uh, if the tour guide or the docent.

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sells the theory that, uh, that they’re saying, then… Um, you know, we would like that. We would maybe put that in the book.

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Yeah. So so we learned a lot of stuff.

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Um, one thing we did was we started to think in terms of what’s the science that could be used for this? And, yeah, we’re not scientists. I don’t even really like math much, but, um, but I do like science fiction, and, um.

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The, uh… and I ended up having jobs in the tech area, so we created some tools that would allow us to do some of the investigation. So here you can see the mystery spot test kit, and we use that on crooked streets.

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And for hauntings and mystery spots, obviously, we had these hazmat suits.

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Which were really just disposable painter cover walls, but we just made a habit of taking them on road trips, and then if we were at any place that was.

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possibly toxic or atomic, uh, you know, nuclear radiation. We’d put these things on. And then we also had this health rate generator that Ken had had gotten at a farmer’s market for, I think it was $2.50.

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Uh, that runs electrical current through your body to, you know, to cure various maladies. And, you know, I mean, we didn’t bring that on the road, really, but uh… but it was in the headquarters.

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Uh, we also had this. This was a character that anybody who had the early book, um… would recall as the Hinged Man, he’s, uh, was made of, uh, cardboard, uh, magic marker, cut-up paper for his clothes, and he’s… he’s measured to be 6 feet tall where that line is, and he folds up in the back seat of the car. So, uh, we took him on the road on a number of trips.

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And would use him for comparing scale and checking the claims of.

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attractions. At the same time, we weren’t trying to be the Guinness Book of World Records, so, you know, it was a little bit more… probably a little more slapdash. Sometimes we had to circle back later and say, oh, we forgot to actually do the measurement.

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But, you know, this made it more fun, and one of the side benefits of the Hinged Man back then is if you had to have 3 occupants in a car, and there were only 2 of us, you could just pop him up in the back seat to create, like, a convincing silhouette.

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Um. The now I grew up in a town, a rural Homedale, New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan, in the town, the main industry was the Bell Laboratories, which was the world’s greatest research lab.

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at the time, the Holmdale building there was built in 1961, uh, designed by architect Aero Saarinen, and he also designed the St. Louis Arch.

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AT&T had Bell Labs inventing things like radar, undersea cable, computer music, information theory, the transistor was a big one back in the 40s.

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And Bell Labs researchers and managers were, like, top of the class. They were half of them had advanced degrees, and it was really an elite sort of research facility.

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This town also, Holmdel had a hill with the horn antenna.

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So I can show you that.

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You’re Doug, you’re muted. Somehow you turned off. You turned your microphone off.

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Can you unmute yourself? No, you’re still muted. Let me see if I need to help you.

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Can you? You’re still muted.

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There, okay. No, all right. And here, just obviously it was going to pick.

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Go ahead.

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Oh, I see. Okay.

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Obviously, it was gonna pick the moment I was talking about the, you know, top-notch tech to do that. I must have tapped the mute button when I was tapping the screen, and that makes… that forces it so that the admin is the only one who can unmute me, I think, so… Okay, anyway, back here to where I was. Okay, so the town had Telstar being tracked from, you know, a mile from my house.

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And uh… we also had a, um… a Nike base, which anybody who’s familiar with that technology back in the Cold War, there were rings of missiles to ward off and to destroy Soviet bombers when they were coming in, you know, to destroy all the major metropolitan areas.

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So, I’m pretty sure we were in a town that was a priority Soviet target to take out, so that was kind of a cool Cold War, you know, badge of honor. Um, the building… uh, was eventually bought by, uh, it closed down, um, I don’t know, about 15 years ago, but it, uh, it was eventually bought by a group of real estate developers, turned into the Bell works business campus.

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And it’s now people might be familiar with it because that transistor water tower and the mirrored building are part of the corporate dystopia on Apple TV’s Severance series.

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Um, oh, and this is just to show the local Boy Scout troop.

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had sort of a Telstar theme, so it was, you know, very… the town was very into all the, uh, science and technology.

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So, uh, and then I had a job after college where I worked at Bell Labs, so a lot of the slides that were developed for Roadside America, I did there. We had an E6 slide processor.

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And I was told that it ran better and cleaner for the paying clients if you ran your personal slides through it. So I didn’t need any more convincing beyond that. So whenever we were shooting on trips, we would shoot slides, and then I’d bring back my rolls and.

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you know, we’d run through the processor. This is just showing some behind-the-scenes things here. The building designed by Saarinen. You know, they made a cake. You want to get the slice that was your office.

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But it was a kind of place, you know, years before there were any e-collecting toll systems in the country. They were testing this stuff on the entrance drive to the building, so we would go through this.

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On the way to work every day, and I had access to… I had a multimedia design lab, and I had access to a bunch of interesting spaces to do projects in. One was a TV studio. So we would do these sort of conceptual things. In this case, we’d.

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had the Galactic overlords when quality was a big imperative in corporations, um, and they’d be trying to win the Malcolm Baldrige Award, or whatever.

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Uh, they’d have us do these motivational slideshows or videos, um… And there’s Ken again, he… I would bring him in, he would sometimes freelance scripts, uh, for some of our projects, and if I got him in, I could maybe persuade him to play a villain. Like, here he played a sexist co-worker.

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In a show for the company’s women’s network. So that that was fun, too. And then I usually try to keep, um… Bell Labs and my roadside life separate, but this is a case where the AT&T employee magazine wanted to do the story on me, because it’s like, oh, here’s an employee doing a book.

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And what was fun about this is they let me pose in New Jersey’s electric chair, which was in the capital Punish Museum in Trenton, New Jersey.

00:30:09.000 –> 00:30:14.000
So that was, uh… Sort of cool. All right. And then here he’s complaining. Okay.

00:30:14.000 –> 00:30:31.000
So once we gathered all this stuff together, we needed to catalog it all and started to come up with categories that sort of fell together, because we noticed that a lot of travel books just wrote about things.

00:30:31.000 –> 00:30:48.000
State by state, region by region, they didn’t really look across the topic the way we were doing, and uh… so we started to chop everything up into, you know, is this… Um, an understandable way to approach it, and um…

00:30:48.000 –> 00:31:07.000
You know, we thought, uh, in the books, we always started with chapters that were easier to understand, something like animal attractions. And then as you moved through the book, we’d figure you were on board, you figured it out so we could take you down more of a twisty path.

00:31:07.000 –> 00:31:21.000
One of the, uh… chapters that we had was called Dreamers back in the original book, and we still use that terminology, at least behind the scenes. And those were basically people who.

00:31:21.000 –> 00:31:35.000
Uh, usually solo, manic projects, off the grid, uh, but it would be somebody building something that, uh, was not commercial, it was something that they, uh, did in their yard, or, you know, on the side of the road, or whatever.

00:31:35.000 –> 00:31:47.000
And these are the names of some of the ones that we’ve either met or, you know, got to see their work after they were gone that had survived.

00:31:47.000 –> 00:31:55.000
And, uh… You know, these are usually the best moments on on our road trips is when we get to talk to.

00:31:55.000 –> 00:32:12.000
the living creators of these things. You know, a lot of these things, they’re… they’ve gone a couple generations, or… They’ve been preserved, but they’ve been put in a sort of a cocoon of preservation, and you only can rely on old, you know, newspaper clippings or an old film.

00:32:12.000 –> 00:32:27.000
to know what the person was like. So this has always been great that we could meet with people, and they’d give you a personal tour, uh, and you’d kind of get little parts of their personality that maybe weren’t, you know, what they would do.

00:32:27.000 –> 00:32:39.000
Um, you know, for the public. Um, okay, uh, and these are a couple of the other dreamers. I think there’s less of these.

00:32:39.000 –> 00:32:54.000
Uh, people at least doing these kind of things now, that because everybody’s aware now of this getting to do this. I think when some of this was done, a lot of them were just toiling away. Maybe they had seen something on their own.

00:32:54.000 –> 00:33:13.000
family vacation, and then they got home and said, hey, I’m retired, I’m gonna do this thing. Somebody like Tom Gaskins over on the left there, he… He got out into the world a little bit when we met him, he came running out of his swamp. He was in his bare feet. He was in his eighties.

00:33:13.000 –> 00:33:25.000
And yet he had been at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, showing his Cypress knees at the Cypress Knee Museum down in Palmdale, Florida.

00:33:25.000 –> 00:33:42.000
And then we met him in ’85 and wrote about in the book because we thought he was really cool. And then we heard from the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. They had gotten a copy of our book and they wanted to know how to contact some of the.

00:33:42.000 –> 00:33:55.000
The Dreamers and some of the people in it, so we… we managed to get Tom Gaskins on The Tonight Show, and so he… they flew him out to Hollywood with a, you know, a suitcase full of his best knees.

00:33:55.000 –> 00:34:10.000
And then he got to talk about them with Johnny Carson. Another example here is Mel Bernstein. This is more recent. 2020 we went to see Mel for the second time. He’s known as a dragon man. He’s got a military museum.

00:34:10.000 –> 00:34:34.000
That’s a really amazing for a private museum. It’s got so many vehicles and so much, um… artifacts and uniforms and everything, and you can even see in this picture, he runs a shooting range, so I think that’s maybe how he… the business that he, uh, is able to subsidize his… his hobby with.

00:34:34.000 –> 00:34:49.000
And then they run these tours through the museum. You can see all the dummies in the back are covered with dry cleaning bags, and that’s something in… through the entire museum, they were all covered this way because of the dust problem. He didn’t want to have to go out and dust them.

00:34:49.000 –> 00:34:58.000
The mannequins every few weeks. So, um, so this actually we thought was cool because it’s creepier the way they’re all under the dry cleaning bags.

00:34:58.000 –> 00:35:09.000
Um, and then just… I won’t spend too much time on this, but this is just to show their sermon ARK. It shows that there’s a prime time to see a dreamer.

00:35:09.000 –> 00:35:23.000
Early on, you don’t know about them because they’re starting, the thing isn’t that big. And that’s phase one. They’ve got a vision, but only they know the vision until they start realizing it.

00:35:23.000 –> 00:35:40.000
Phase 2 is they start to get recognition. Maybe the local newspaper reporter wants to write about it as a, you know, little fluff piece or something. But the notoriety grows, um, and it starts to get picked up maybe by, you know, art.

00:35:40.000 –> 00:35:51.000
the art world, the folk art, uh, preservationists, the, you know, different groups that would enjoy it, you know, like the Society of Commercial Archaeology, for example.

00:35:51.000 –> 00:35:57.000
Um, and… but what we saw is that they were built to a pinnacle of.

00:35:57.000 –> 00:36:15.000
you know, they’re doing the maximum amount of work on their structure, and they’re not spending all their time doing their media tour. But then what happens is inevitably, they start spending more time on the attention the attraction gets instead of the attraction itself.

00:36:15.000 –> 00:36:22.000
And then as they get older, it starts to drop. You know, we’ve been to some where we get there and.

00:36:22.000 –> 00:36:32.000
the person doesn’t want to take us around to show us the thing, they just want us to look at pictures in other people’s books of them being, you know, highlighted or whatever.

00:36:32.000 –> 00:36:46.000
Um, and then there’s also a phase where they realize the runway is ending and they don’t want the thing to just disappear. So they look for a handoff. How are they going to get this to somebody if they don’t have children?

00:36:46.000 –> 00:37:11.000
to do as a hand-me-down, will a museum take it? You know, we heard a lot of people say, I hope the Smithsonian, you know, can give me a wing for my… collection of sanitary napkins or whatever. You know, it would be… and, you know, that’s a real… that’s a real example. But that doesn’t happen, you know, and if it does, it’s more of that Indiana Jones, uh.

00:37:11.000 –> 00:37:30.000
scenario where you end up in the storage facility next to the Ark of the Covenant. And then, you know, the dreamers die and we in Roadside America, we actually have some of the dreamer graves because we think, yeah, that that’s still part of that continuum that somebody might be interested in.

00:37:30.000 –> 00:37:57.000
This is one that, you know, we featured this one in, I think it was the second book, um, and this is Max Nordine. He was, uh… Very interesting character. He used to be an auctioneer, so when he would give a tour, uh, he would, uh, he would be talking like an auctioneer, and if you tried to jump ahead in all the little artifacts he was showing you, he’d pull you back. He would not let you break the rhythm of what he wanted to show you.

00:37:57.000 –> 00:38:16.000
Uh, so he’d rail about how cheap people were, uh, how Hitler loved nudity, he’d get starry-eyed talking about his spark plug collection, and then he showed us this thing that he claimed was a petrified prehistoric leech. Um, he said a guy sold it to him, said he got it in Mexico.

00:38:16.000 –> 00:38:28.000
Um, you know, we visited years later and Max was still firehose. And then years after that he died and his museum items were auctioned.

00:38:28.000 –> 00:38:45.000
Uh, and one of our enthusiastic contributors, Craig Tome, who I believe is on this call, went to the auction, and, you know, we said, get that leech, you know, we gotta have that leech. So, uh, we bankrolled the acquisition. We said he could bid it up, you know, it went to $100, we had to have that leech.

00:38:45.000 –> 00:38:50.000
And so he did get it. I think he got it for 50.

00:38:50.000 –> 00:38:55.000
And here, I just have a little snippet of the.

00:38:55.000 –> 00:39:10.000
Yes, it is. Little Petrified lead, 296. I don’t get there, taking it right to it, right?

00:39:10.000 –> 00:39:30.000
44. 45.

00:39:30.000 –> 00:39:39.000
Anyway, so Craig, Craig recorded that when he when he got it. So that was great.

00:39:39.000 –> 00:39:42.000
The petrified leech!

00:39:42.000 –> 00:39:48.000
We also made T-shirts with the leech and then sold them on the site for a while.

00:39:48.000 –> 00:40:02.000
Uh, okay. A part of exploring attractions is awareness and respect for the rules. Um, it might be safety, liability, and we… you just get a kick out of sometimes the signs you see, uh, so these are just some examples.

00:40:02.000 –> 00:40:09.000
Uh, you know, the last one was don’t… you have to kneel on the holy stairs. This one was, you have to put clothes on.

00:40:09.000 –> 00:40:14.000
Um, this one is just letting you know that Krishna’s watching you.

00:40:14.000 –> 00:40:20.000
Uh, this one said, you know, stay on the road, or, you know, if you don’t want to look like this.

00:40:20.000 –> 00:40:27.000
Uh, we always love this one, uh, that was at one of the, uh… the animal attractions down in Florida.

00:40:27.000 –> 00:40:38.000
Uh, and then, uh… I guess this one sort of takes the cake these days is up on the Redwood Highway.

00:40:38.000 –> 00:40:48.000
one of the attractions has all these signs that, uh, that are just ridiculous. So, uh… You know, enjoyed that.

00:40:48.000 –> 00:40:54.000
Um, and then, of course, there’s souvenirs. I’ll just step through these real quick.

00:40:54.000 –> 00:41:11.000
we look for things that are unique. You gotta get them fast. In the case of the Elvis booties, the great… the Graceland Lawyers shut that down. They didn’t want people buying or manufacturing Elvis face booties.

00:41:11.000 –> 00:41:25.000
Um, atomic bomb earrings became problematic eventually. Uh, when foreign or overseas visitors came and, you know, the reaction was not good.

00:41:25.000 –> 00:41:30.000
Um, this is a JFK Salt and pepper shaker.

00:41:30.000 –> 00:41:49.000
And, uh… You know, I mean, it’s probably inadvertent that the salt holes are in the back of his head, but, you know, this is a rare souvenir. It was probably sold more, not just in a souvenir place, but just it was a commemorative kind of thing.

00:41:49.000 –> 00:42:13.000
This one is Hannah Dustin. She was, uh, uh… A character, a woman who was kidnapped by Indians and then she massacred them in their sleep, but she’s got all these statues where they sort of celebrate her up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

00:42:13.000 –> 00:42:29.000
And, of course, there’s a bobblehead. Uh, and then this is a scurvy begun, it’s just a medicine that you can buy in a pirate shop in San Francisco. So even things like that, we have an interest in.

00:42:29.000 –> 00:42:45.000
Uh, and, you know, over time, we start to collect this. This is an old picture. We don’t actually have a room that looks like this anymore, but you can kind of… you all know from your own travels, you gotta figure out what do you do with these souvenirs? You put them in a tub? Do you sort of quietly throw them away?

00:42:46.000 –> 00:42:54.000
We keep them all. We also developed a couple villains, you know, sort of tongue-in-cheek.

00:42:54.000 –> 00:43:07.000
Uh, this was Lady Bird Johnson because of the 1965 highway beautification act had eliminated billboards on the interstates. So a lot of the, um, the old.

00:43:07.000 –> 00:43:13.000
school tourist attraction owners didn’t like this. They didn’t like that they couldn’t have billboards everywhere.

00:43:13.000 –> 00:43:32.000
So we made her, oh yeah, she’s a villain. She’s working against the roadside attractions. And this… Artwork was done, this cartoon was done by a guy named Kevin Zuban, who I worked with at Bell Labs. He was a great cartoonist. He still is, and he, you know, generously.

00:43:32.000 –> 00:43:34.000
provided it, and we put it in the book.

00:43:34.000 –> 00:43:50.000
Uh, in the second book, we had… we realized we… we had too much information, and even though they gave us more pages in the next book, we couldn’t fit everything. So the last page of the second book was 500 places not mentioned in the New Roadside America.

00:43:50.000 –> 00:43:56.000
Speaking of not being able to fit everything, Doug, we’re kind of… we’re starting to run out of time.

00:43:56.000 –> 00:43:57.000
Do you have a lot more? Because we can have a second edition of this if we need it.

00:43:57.000 –> 00:44:10.000
Okay. I’m… We could, but let me I’ll I’ll skip the cat taxidermy Schrodinger paradox slide.

00:44:10.000 –> 00:44:17.000
Yeah, yeah, see, I was gonna lose him. Um… Yeah, where am I? I’m pretty far off.

00:44:17.000 –> 00:44:33.000
Okay, well, these are, um… These are just sort of stepping us through, uh… moving… moving into the web world. So I did want to cover a little bit of that. Let me just jump ahead here.

00:44:33.000 –> 00:44:44.000
This is some of the early, um… home pages that we had, um… this was in the 1996 timeframe.

00:44:44.000 –> 00:44:53.000
Uh, and, you know, we… we started to transition from paper and film to digital content.

00:44:53.000 –> 00:45:07.000
Hand in hand with that is, uh, is the maps. You know, early on, our books didn’t have any maps really yet. We didn’t have any directions in those, but there was obviously more of a need for finding the places.

00:45:07.000 –> 00:45:25.000
On the website, we did a lot of thematic maps. And as… Uh, the technology got better, people were using handheld GPS devices, and then with things like Google Maps, we were able to start doing, you know, very complex mapping.

00:45:25.000 –> 00:45:31.000
Um, the muffler men is a good example of that. Started as a minor category for us.

00:45:31.000 –> 00:45:45.000
Um, you know, these guys, uh, that you could see everywhere, but nobody knew their, their back story. And, um, we started to put that together.

00:45:45.000 –> 00:45:50.000
Uh, step through these. Uh, this, the Smithsonian story.

00:45:50.000 –> 00:46:07.000
sort of broken open as far as people finding out about this phenomenon. We told them about the categories that we created. All right, are oversaturated there. And then just a few, I can just show you these here too.

00:46:07.000 –> 00:46:20.000
Over the years, the people that we’ve sort of influenced, you know, our concepts find life elsewhere. So one is the weird Al Yankovic biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.

00:46:20.000 –> 00:46:28.000
Um, was he… somebody gave him a copy of one of our books, and that’s where he got all the attractions in his song. So that was pretty cool.

00:46:28.000 –> 00:46:45.000
Um, Jeff Bezos once referred to his two favorite websites was NASA and Roadside America. And so we kind of viewed it as, well, okay, he’s got a big decision. Is he going to bankroll space travel or quirky roadside attraction travel?

00:46:45.000 –> 00:46:56.000
So, you know, you know what he chose. And then this is just a personal favorite. Bill Griffith, the cartoonist for Zippy the Pinhead.

00:46:56.000 –> 00:47:15.000
And I guess with the year 2000, decided he was gonna have Zippy meet a muffler man. So he contacted me, and, you know, we got the original artwork from him, and then, you know, of course, in subsequent years, Zippy and the Muffler Men have interacted a lot, so that’s kind of cool.

00:47:15.000 –> 00:47:38.000
I guess I could skip this stuff… Yeah, these are more fun characters. This is Mark Klein, who’s, uh… artist, museum or tourist attraction creator in Virginia. He’s a guy who created Foam Henge.

00:47:38.000 –> 00:47:53.000
And, uh, on the other side here, I’ve got Secret Caverns, some of the underground artists there who do the great billboards that we used to see, we’d come back just to see the latest season of billboards that they had created.

00:47:53.000 –> 00:48:12.000
We did our president’s travel app that has been out there for since the Obama administration. And if you want actually the inside story on these presidents, you got to talk to Kurt Dion or go to his.

00:48:12.000 –> 00:48:20.000
His, uh, information online, because he’s been visiting the grave since he was 11 years old. So we have an interview with him up.

00:48:20.000 –> 00:48:27.000
Um, this is… Just my finishing thing here is just this.

00:48:27.000 –> 00:48:40.000
exclaves of map quirks, and this is just I think this is interesting. We never run out of stuff to do, and we’ve been starting to go after the not the low-hanging fruit, but the fruit way up at the top of the tree. In this case.

00:48:40.000 –> 00:49:01.000
It was a place called Angle Inlet in Minnesota. It’s actually… you can only get to it by driving through Canada or by boat. So there’s 4 checks of your passport, um… And you’ve got to do it remotely with a customs tablet or call Canada by the phone.

00:49:01.000 –> 00:49:15.000
Um, and the big payoff is you get to shoot a picture of this northernmost point buoy, which is a mirror image of the one down in the southernmost point down in Florida.

00:49:15.000 –> 00:49:36.000
And fun thing that happened here, we got there 10 minutes before the closing of the post office, and as we pulled up, the lights went off inside, and we saw the woman who was in there crouched behind the counter and hide, and she went and opened the door, so we thought, oh, okay, that’s… That was much better than if the thing had been open. You know, we love that.

00:49:36.000 –> 00:49:43.000
Um, okay, and then this is just some of the ways you can contact us, uh, or see more of our material.

00:49:43.000 –> 00:50:00.000
These are some of our boosters family members, friends who who have supported us on this stuff and, you know, send their own tips in. My brother Jay is a long time engineer with us on it.

00:50:00.000 –> 00:50:16.000
Okay, and I’m told I can plug the new app, which is Roadside 66, and I’ll just say to kind of give a setup for for Brian and Risk Martin. Ris has a bunch of photos in our app. So we worked with him to.

00:50:16.000 –> 00:50:22.000
To get some material, and I’m sure, you know, looking forward to his talk in April.

00:50:22.000 –> 00:50:23.000
All right, that’s it for for me.

00:50:23.000 –> 00:50:44.000
Well, thanks so much, Doug. That was… What a remarkable presentation. You’ve had a great ride on the roadside, for sure, from the beginning when you first started getting interested up to now, like the the illustrations and the graphics in this presentation here are amazing. Like, they’re wonderful and masterful.

00:50:44.000 –> 00:50:45.000
So, I’m really…

00:50:45.000 –> 00:51:01.000
What? Yeah, I kind of I can’t I kind of wanted to, as I was doing it, I realized I’m only like probably 2 months ahead of everybody in the world getting to do the exact same thing. So, you know, I mean, it’s it’s this stuff is is you can do some of these cartoons yourself.

00:51:01.000 –> 00:51:12.000
But you, you know, you gotta spend a little time on it. And of course, I’m trying to get the AI to do my exact style, and it… that’s a little harder, you know?

00:51:12.000 –> 00:51:24.000
Wow. Oh, yeah, for sure. Now, I just want to show everybody my own… I don’t know if it’s… oh, it’s fuzzy, but this is my own personal copy of Roadside America.

00:51:24.000 –> 00:51:26.000
Hold it. Hold it in front of your face.

00:51:26.000 –> 00:51:42.000
Oh, yeah, there it is. I it’s you can see it better now. I was looking to see if it’s signed or anything, but it’s not. I got it in the used bookstore, but I… when I read this book, and it’s years ago that I read it, I laughed my head off. This was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. This thing was just amazing.

00:51:42.000 –> 00:52:04.000
So, thank you for that. Now, um, I definitely will be downloading the app, because I’m planning to take a trip on the mother road this, uh… This, um, year to head to the SEA’s conference in La in July. But we don’t have much time for questions, but we do have a few questions. So we can hit a few of them.

00:52:04.000 –> 00:52:21.000
Uh, Doug, let me see… and there’s all sorts of good comments in here that you, uh, well, you’ll get a copy of the chat, so you can read it at your leisure. Bill Swisslow, who is on our board, the SEA board, says, can you talk about how the economics of your project have changed.

00:52:21.000 –> 00:52:25.000
With the changes in book publishing and travel guides.

00:52:25.000 –> 00:52:55.000
Okay, yeah, that that’s a pretty easy one. So we did, you know, we only did a couple of books there where there’s some side projects that are roadside adjacent things, but we decided once the web came along, we just didn’t have the patience for doing, um, you know, books anymore. We we, uh… We have something like 22,000 attractions on the site and things that we wanted to say in the books. I mean, we always use the joke that capital punishment Museum in Trenton, we had three pages written about it, but the final book only had two sentences, you know, so.

00:53:02.000 –> 00:53:08.000
Um, so we didn’t really miss out on the having.

00:53:08.000 –> 00:53:18.000
you know, the publicist at the at the publications in the book publishers, you know, controlling our destiny.

00:53:18.000 –> 00:53:42.000
Um, but, you know, then again, we can see that books have endured as, like, a symbol of… credibility, you know, like, like, if you say you have a website, that was a big deal in 1996. Now it’s like, who doesn’t have a website? Who doesn’t, you know, who doesn’t make, uh, video? Who doesn’t have their own TV channel or video channel, you know, so.

00:53:42.000 –> 00:54:00.000
So it’s like all the things, all the sort of media trappings that we were experts at in the early days, it’s like some, you know, people decided they… everybody wants to do that. And so I don’t know what’s… I think there’s always going to be the specialty print world.

00:54:00.000 –> 00:54:18.000
Um, you know, books that are more prestige books, or just things that, you know, my wife and I can, actually, all of us are still, um, you know, Susan and Ken and Mike, we all are still big readers. Uh, we all would prefer to sit and read a paper book.

00:54:18.000 –> 00:54:28.000
And I’ve got a stack of them that I’m going to get to now that this presentation is done.

00:54:28.000 –> 00:54:29.000
Yeah.

00:54:29.000 –> 00:54:41.000
Oh, okay, well, that’s a good answer. Theresa leaves asked, and it’s kind of a funny question, sort of ironic, I think. She says, what’s your favorite and your least favorite attraction that you saw? Now, the least favorite could be your favorite, because maybe it’s.

00:54:41.000 –> 00:54:42.000
Really nasty, but anyways, the question is, do you have a favorite and a least favorite?

00:54:42.000 –> 00:55:03.000
Whoa. I think the ones that are our favorites. Of course, we had the Seven Wonders, which were these things that were just so mind-blowing at the at the beginning, but a lot of times, the ones that are my favorites are the ones that are a total surprise, like, and, you know, we…

00:55:03.000 –> 00:55:26.000
We talk about this on the website. There is a 1880 cowboy town up in South Dakota. We didn’t know anything about it. We were driving along, we were going to… an authentic 1880 pioneer town, and then we see this billboard, uh, 1880 cowboy town, and then it said something about robots, right? So we thought, oh, we pull off, you know, throw the schedule away, we’re gonna go to this… this thing instead.

00:55:26.000 –> 00:55:52.000
It was amazing, it was like a guy running the entryway in a store, and you go in, and it was an entire western town, just like the movie, uh, or the series Westworld. It was all… Western, you know, the saloon, and the Opera House, and the jail, and all this, the stables, and it was all robots, and they were all, you know, moving, and um…

00:55:52.000 –> 00:55:59.000
And, but some of them were broken, and that’s always our favorite thing. When the robots are broken, there’s a.

00:55:59.000 –> 00:56:28.000
The thing is much more enjoyable, so they had an Abel Lincoln, and they had pulled the stovepipe hat down over his eyes, and we asked about it when we went back, we said, what’s with the… why is that pulled over his eyes? And the guy said, well, the eyes… had gone wonky. They were robotic eyes, and he said that children… it was scaring small children. Children were crying, and so he… he said… and he said to me, he said, that… that darn robot repair guy, he was supposed to be here last month, and he didn’t come.

00:56:28.000 –> 00:56:52.000
And it’s like, wait, that’s a whole layer of roadside. We didn’t even think about. There’s a traveling robot repair guy, and… So I’ve got and if you if anybody looks at our videos on YouTube, I’m going to put that one up in the next few days. It’s… I’ve got a one called Waiting for the Robot Repair Guy, and it’s, uh, it’s just a little, you know, thing I made that’s got a song and everything.

00:56:52.000 –> 00:56:53.000
Yeah. What?

00:56:53.000 –> 00:56:59.000
Oh, my God, that is fantastic. Do you have one that stands out as something that really disappointed that you’re excited to see, and you go and you go, oh my god, this is terrible?

00:56:59.000 –> 00:57:16.000
Well, I’ll just answer that by saying Ken and I sift through… nothing goes up on our website that we don’t pass judgment on. There’s no crowdsourcing, crowd, you know, sharing of the… we don’t allow people to rate attractions, it’s like, our ratings.

00:57:16.000 –> 00:57:44.000
And, uh… We’ve just got… I’ve got, like, tens of thousands of submitted places that we just don’t include. For a while, we had, um… We had a… we had a search engine called Roger, which is the one that’s on the public website, and then we had one called Rudy, and he’s, like, the one where all the tips that didn’t make it go. So if I wanted to, we could publish all the Rudy tips.

00:57:44.000 –> 00:57:55.000
But we… it’s just, uh, and they look like a… and I guess I’ll explain this, I have a video on this too, but Roger is named after Roger Williams.

00:57:55.000 –> 00:58:24.000
who was the founder of Rhode Island, and he was buried and then an apple tree that was above him. The roots basically consumed him. And so at some point they disinterred him and Roger wasn’t there anymore, but there was a root in the shape of Roger.

00:58:24.000 –> 00:58:26.000
His dim brother. So, um…

00:58:26.000 –> 00:58:33.000
Oh, well, that’s fascinating. Now, we just have time for one more, so I’ll pose it here.

00:58:33.000 –> 00:58:48.000
Um, Joseph Espana asks, he says, can you talk about your take on the current appeal for roadside experiences? He says, what do you think about the future having to shift or apply new medias to stay alive?

00:58:48.000 –> 00:58:52.000
he says, I personally have spoken with Enchanted Highway.

00:58:52.000 –> 00:59:02.000
Jennifer is Tom Devlin’s Museum, Dorothy’s House in Kansas, etc. They want to embrace animatronics and lighting effects to stay with the times. Do you think that’s the future?

00:59:02.000 –> 00:59:20.000
Like, no, those unless there’s, you know, they start teaching robot repair in, you know, school. The robots break down. We’ve noticed that anybody who’s put computer touchscreens into their attractions, aside from ruining the classic charm of the place.

00:59:20.000 –> 00:59:31.000
Those things just break, you know? It’s like you… they don’t last. So, I’m not sure that I would say that helps. I’m hoping there’ll be a movement to make things.

00:59:31.000 –> 00:59:48.000
the way they used to be, like in the in the 50s and 60s. Like, go back… go backwards, you know, like, get rid of all the, you know, the clean energy stuff, and I… I mean, yeah, not in society at large, but I mean, just for these attractions, I think they’re.

00:59:48.000 –> 01:00:03.000
Um, they’re gonna do better. I think some of the Route 66 attractions are embracing that. They bring back the old gas stations and the neon. You know, if you do, if you do neon with real neon now.

01:00:03.000 –> 01:00:15.000
That’s actually… better than using some new technology, I think. It’s harder to maintain, it’s more expensive, but it’s… it’s really… there’s an audience who wants to see that.

01:00:15.000 –> 01:00:45.000
Oh, and that audience exists in the SCA, because I’ll tell you, Doug, there are people in the SCA that if you ask them to compare NEON with LEDs, oh, you’re in for an earful. And you have to have some time. Well, anyways, that’s… That’s all the time we have for questions. Now, just before we go, I want to thank you again, Doug. That was a fantastic presentation. A few technical difficulties, but that’s okay. We stopped the recording, so it’ll look really good when it hits the website tomorrow, and I would also like to remind everybody about.

01:00:49.000 –> 01:00:53.000
Next month went on Wednesday, April the 22nd, at our usual time.

01:00:53.000 –> 01:01:01.000
Winrus Martin will tell us what really set Route 66 apart from any other numbered highway. Was it luck or was it intentional?

01:01:01.000 –> 01:01:18.000
and how does this road of nostalgia stay relevant and vibrant in the modern age? So Riz will share the journey of the road itself from the early days to the so-called golden era, to the modern revitalization movement. He will also share how the uniquely.

01:01:18.000 –> 01:01:30.000
American road trip experience appeals to audiences from around the globe, and what ultimately led him to become involved in the greater Route 66 community. That’s a very good tie-in with your presentation tonight, Doc.

01:01:30.000 –> 01:01:47.000
And it’s interesting, as you said, that he supplied some pictures for your latest endeavors. Now, SCA members will be receiving the relevant details and registration link for the January talk by email, and others can register through the SCA website directly.

01:01:47.000 –> 01:01:57.000
So thanks everyone this evening and this afternoon for spending some time with us. If you’re not currently a member of the SCA, you will receive an invite.

01:01:57.000 –> 01:02:14.000
By email, uh, inviting you to join the SCA and enjoy all the benefits of membership. And remember that if you have friends or colleagues who weren’t able to join us tonight, the recording of this presentation will be available on the SCA’s.

01:02:14.000 –> 01:02:25.000
website, uh, probably tomorrow morning. Our web people are very, very efficient, but if not tomorrow morning, it’ll be very soon. Did you have any last words for us, Doug, before we go?

01:02:25.000 –> 01:02:39.000
Uh, well, I just… these places are, you know, some people think that it’s all in the past, and we didn’t find that, you know, there are new places all the time, and I think if you go out with the right attitude.

01:02:39.000 –> 01:02:42.000
you know, you’re gonna have a great trip.

01:02:42.000 –> 01:02:53.000
Okay, well, thank you very much. I couldn’t agree with you more. Your work is highly entertaining and and very, very useful and worthwhile.

01:02:53.000 –> 01:02:54.000
No, thanks, Brian.

01:02:54.000 –> 01:02:57.000
So thank you again, and I’m now going to say goodnight.