While still at the American Coach repair facility in Decatur, IN we took a tour of the Fleetwood RV factory (sorry, no photos allowed). It was interesting, but as Heinz says, it made us appreciate the quality of our 12 year old coach even more. The Fleetwoods are certainly good products, but a lot of the little things left me loving my older home more and more. Little things like real wood instead of pressed lumber, rich varnishes instead of thin coats of varnish with lots of lacquer on top, evenly spaced and flat floor tiles instead of uneven tile placement, and I'm sure Heinz noticed lots of things in the "innards" of the coach. I kept remembering the gentleman who told us that our model year coach was from "when we knew how to build them". I agree!
As long as we were hanging out in the middle of Indiana, we took an afternoon and drove up to Auburn, Indiana to check out the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum. It is housed in a beautiful, fully restored Art Deco building that originally served as both the former Auburn Automobile Company's national headquarters and it's dealer-only showroom. The collection contains vintage Auburns, Cords, and Duesenbergs from 1925-1937, other Indiana made automobiles of the era, and automobiles of what the museum calls "special interest"--automobiles that represent the best examples of luxury, styling, performance, or engineering. In addition, the museum has artifacts of automobile manufacturing such as design concepts, blueprints, full-scale drawings on aluminum sheets, wooden bucks for beating/shaping the panels, promotional materials, etc. If you make your way to Indiana, be sure to stop in at this great museum - we spent hours!
The Auburn Automobile Company started in 1900 with a design for a one-cylinder car that reached showroom floors in 1903. By 1905 the company was making two-cylinder cars and by 1912, six cylinders were the norm. In 1904, E. L. Cord joined the company as general manager and purchased the company from the owners in 1926. That same year Auburn bought out Fred Duesenberg and commissioned him to build the world's finest motorcar. 1928 brought the introduction of the Duesenberg Model J (the nation's most expensive luxury car). The Cord motorcar, America's first front-drive production car, was unveiled with Auburn's 1929 models. Despite the Great Depression, Auburn broke all previous sales records in 1931 with over 32,000 luxury units sold (average price $15,000 when the average worker made $4000 annually). Manufacturing ceased in 1937 due to changing tastes, hard economic times and internal corporate turmoil.
Reflections
Reflections in car fender
Sitting in an early automobile
1929 Auburn
A prototype for a post-WWII American sports car that featured the world's first T-top roof. Gordon Buehrig designed the car and patented the T-top idea. He later sued GM when they used the design on the 1968 Corvette.
Clay model for an early Auburn.
Painted aluminum design panel. These were recycled - when no longer needed, they painted over the metal, and scribed new lines for the next design - so very few exist today. Designs were drawn on the panel at full scale and used on the production line.
Painted aluminum design panel.
1932 Auburn.
Art Deco showroom floor.
As long as the motor coach was having some maintenance work done, we decided to chase a squirrel and head over to Colorado for an impromptu reunion of Heinz's family. The event was planned around the Scots Festival in Estes Park, but we were having so much fun hanging out with each other, that no one ever made it to the Festival!
Maureen and Annelee checking out the family shots.
Reunion over, it was back to Indiana to pick up the rig and head further south. Plans were made: Memphis, TN for two nights, followed by two nights in Little Rock, AR, then back to Shreveport and some time with my family. We stretched the drive to Memphis over two days simply to avoid a long 12 hour drive.
Memphis held a few too many sights to see for only a two night stay, so we extended by a night and mapped out our agenda. Day one: Graceland, STAX Records Museum, and the Gibson Guitar Factory. Day two: National Museum of Civil Rights, Rock-n-Soul Museum, and Sun Studio. Both days: killer BBQ. Success!! For once, we actually completed all points of interest as planned!
Neither one of us are big Elvis fans, but really, we're in Memphis... home of the King... you gotta go to Graceland - right? So we did! Graceland is considered a "mansion", but compared to today's houses, it's kinda small - and decorated in vintage over-the-top 1970s. If you listen well, you can hear his ghost wandering around, singing the songs you've heard all your life. Oh, sorry... that's not his ghost... that's the sound system playing Elvis non-stop everywhere you go. We bought the Platinum ticket that lets you into six sites/events, from Elvis' house and gardens; to his airplanes; to his cars; to a walk up the street to a strip mall containing a gift shop showing a movie about his '68 tour, and another cubicle containing some of his costumes. If you make it to Memphis, by all means, you can not NOT go to Graceland - for crying out loud... it's a cultural icon. But consider only doing the house and garden tour - the rest was (to us) somewhat underwhelming. It is however, still immensely popular - 35 years after his death, 600,000 people still travel annually from all over the world (we followed a group from Portugal) to visit Graceland.
The King
Graceland
Living Room
Pool Room
Gold records on display in an outbuilding behind the house. It's estimated that there have been greater than 1 BILLION Elvis records sold worldwide.
More gold records on display. In the U.S. alone, Elvis had 150 different albums and singles with gold, platinum, or multi-platinum sales.
Elvis' grave. He is buried on Graceland's grounds along with his mother, father, and grandmother.
For a different view of early Rock and Roll, we headed across town to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Stax Records was founded in 1957 as Satellite Records and the name Stax adopted in 1961. The label was instrumental in the creation of the Memphis sound, a mix of gospel, funk, jazz, and blues. Some of the labels best known artists were Booker T. and the MGs, Otis Redding, and Issac Hayes. In 1975 the label went bankrupt and the studio closed. Over the years the building deteriorated and was finally torn down in 1989. In 1998, a group of concerned citizens and anonymous benefactors spearheaded a community revitalization effort. Construction began on the Stax Museum and the adjacent Stax Music Academy in 2001. The Museum is a replica of the Stax recording studio and houses more than 2,000 videos, photographs, musical instruments, stage costumes, and other memorabilia. The museum is one of only a handful of museums in the world dedicated to soul music and celebrates the legacy of Stax Records along along with featuring other soul music labels such as Motown, Hi Records, Atlantic Records and Muscle Shoals.
The Stax Music Academy is a state of the art facility where primarily at-risk youth are mentored through music education and unique performance opportunities. The building also houses the Soulsville Charter School, an academically rigorous, musically rich school.
Kind of says it all, doesn't it:)
Reconstruction of Stax Records facility
Heinz checking out the guitar of Steve Cropper of Booker T. and the MGs.
Hallway lined with albums recorded at Stax Records.
After rocking out for a couple of hours at Stax Records, we headed a few miles over for a tour of the Gibson Guitar Factory, Memphis. We got a behind the goggles look at all the shaping, binding, neck-fitting, painting, buffing, and fine tuning that ends up as an electric guitar. Sorry - no photos were allowed on the factory floor itself.
Factory store, choose your fun.
We ended up day one in Memphis with some knock-out BBQ at The Pig on Beale. This restaurant specializes in pork shoulder and ribs and their motto is "Pork with an Attitude". The menu has around 15 BBQ awards listed for last year alone (not like the restaurant across the street that won something back in 1991) and the front windows are filled with trophies. My take on the place--yum!!
Trophies in the window of The Pig on Beale, in lieu of pictures of the baby back ribs.
Late afternoon on Beale St., home of Memphis blues.
Day two and we were up and running again. First stop: The National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is located in the Lorraine Motel, site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The museum also encompasses the rooming house across the street where James Earl Ray stayed and from where he fired his fatal shot. The museum is devoted to chronicling key episodes of the American civil rights movement and its impact on human rights efforts globally. The main focus of the museum is education.
February 1st, 1960, Greensboro, NC. Four students from North Carolina A&T sat down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ask to be served. This action ignited a wave of student sit-ins and protests that flashed across the South. This is the actual counter.
Lesson plan from a 1960s Freedom School. Still important concepts today.
You can spend all day in the Civil Rights Museum - but we didn't have that long... so off we went to the Rock-n-Soul Museum. This museum was created by the Smithsonian Institution to tell the story of "musical pioneers that created the music that shook the world". It offers a comprehensive look at the Memphis music experience from the rural field songs of the 1930s, through the explosion of the 1950s and, on to the heyday of the 1970s. The museum has a digital audio tour packed with information and music. You stroll the galleries and look and listen (and perhaps dance) at your leisure. There's approximately 5 hours of information and music on the audio tour, so kick back and roam to your heart's content. We opted out after about 2 1/2 hours and headed off to our next stop.
Heinz groovin' to the sounds on a 1947 Wurlitzer "bubbler" jukebox.
After rocking out for hours to the Memphis sound, it seemed only appropriate to finish up at Sun Studio. The recording studio was opened by Sam Phillips in 1950. Over the years it was the recording home of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich, among others. In 1969, Sam Phillips sold the label and there was no recording-related activity in the building until the September 1985, Class of '55, recording sessions with Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. In 1987 the studio was re-opened as a recording label and tourist attraction. A tour stop in the daytime, the studio is still an active recording studio at night, by artists as varied as U2, Def Leppard, Bonnie Raitt, and Ringo Starr who come to get the vintage sound caused by the original ceiling tiles that are still in place.
Sun Record, remember those days of partying to your 45s?
Heinz in the studio, recording home of Elvis and the rest. Check out those ceiling tiles, circa 1954.
We ended up our day with more stellar Memphis BBQ at Germantown Commissary. Commissaries were small country stores located throughout the South. They sold everything from horse collars to hamburger. The original Commissary in Germantown, TN was a store for over 90 years, until it was bought by the present owner in 1981. He turned it into a dynamite BBQ joint. We enjoyed some wonderful hickory-smoked ribs to top off our time in Memphis.
Or at least we thought that meal would top off our time in Memphis. After getting back to the rig Heinz decided to run a late evening errand and headed off to the store. An hour or so later he returned home, in a police car. Seems that on his way home he was hit broadside at an intersection by a woman who ran a stop sign. Luckily there were no injuries, but here we sit, waiting on the auto body shop to report give us a heads up. The accident happened on Saturday night and with waiting to communicate with the insurance company on Monday, taking a day to move the car to the auto body shop, taking a day to assess damages, and getting it fixed, it's now Thursday night, we're watching a lame Giants/Panthers game, and hoping the car will be ready by close of business tomorrow.
Oh well, here's our friends of the day from Colorado:
Mule deer at Rocky Mountain National Park
Elk at Rocky Mountain National Park
Dinner time
Oscar, King of the Marsh household
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