Continuing Reflections on Summer Travels; or What we learned in Kansas City, Oxford, Memphis, Knoxville, Little Rock, Bartlesville, and Woodward.
Charles Peek
Two weeks at home so we could catch up on friends, events, and laundry (not necessarily in that order) and then off for a couple of days with friends Marty Townsend and Clark Swisher in Kansas City en route to Mississippi to see friends gathering for the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference where Chuck took part in Teaching Faulkner sessions for over 30 years.
In Kansas City we forsook our old standby lodging, now transformed to a less delightful spot, and Marty found for us the 816 Hotel in Westport, not far from our old watering spot, McCoy’s—now sadly to closed to build yet another hotel. The 816 bore all the bane of boutiques—too much chichi, too little attention to details, such as the overworked attendant in the breakfast room. But, it was a comfortable place, well located, good value lodging with helpful staff at the front desk. Part of a chain of hotels named for the area code where they are located. And near a couple of restaurants, the Bluestem that looked pretty good but we never got back to, another the Pot Pie we can vouch for: tasty, congenial, economical. You can guess their specialty!
We might have gotten back to the Bluestem, but went off instead to find KC’s 2nd or 3rd best (accounts vary) BBQ, only to see at least a 2-hour wait, then off to the 1st or 2nd best (family feuds over this) BBQ—only an hour and a half wait. We don’t wait that long, even at home said the sage Marty, so we went next door to Lidia’s where Nancy and I and the family celebrated our 50th anniversary four years ago. Great food, great location, and this trip a really congenial waiter!
Host asked us as we were leaving if we were still married!
Highlights in KC included the Stonehenge Exhibit at Union Station—well mounted, informative, and catches you up on the latest anthropological studies of the site—a site that we’d been disappointed in 35 years before, having arrived there to find mostly the litter left by a huge gathering of self-styled hippies. Union Station is fun, parking fee reasonable, and lunch at the Harvey on the upper deck was again good, reasonable, and friendly.
Also ventured into the emerging America of the new mall in Leewood. The new sprawled out, drive from place to place malls are not my cup of tea. Nor was seeing the new trend, for example at Renovation Hardware, mega-buck costs, e.g. $400 lamps and $2000 chairs—just more evidence of the disastrous disparity of economic means in today’s America. But, social critique aside, it was a fun day for our foursome, with a new ensemble for Nancy from Chico’s and a good lunch at Houlihan’s with a very engaging girl who waited on us and, having been a track runner at the local high school, knew lots of people Clark Swisher knew from coaching teams competing against them at years of meets. Sharp young woman. Sharp memory, Clark! Nice place to watch the better part of the British Open while Nancy and Marty shopped…not that we were keeping time.
Even Chico’s for all of its charms could not quite match the Boomerang where I picked up a great buy on a lined denim jacket, a purchase which paled against the “Titanic” era outfits Marty and Clark found for their book group’s upcoming costume-dinner with the reading of A Night to Remember—where each guest will represent one of the passengers. If the prices seemed to them a bit steep for a one-event wear, I suggested that they could probably stage other disasters parties in which they could always represent the Titanic. The idea didn’t seem to get kicked around as much as it deserved!
What’s KC without taking in a Royals game, even these Royals. Injuries and trades have taken their toll on the team we saw their pennant year, but they won the game we saw, aided by our purchase of concessions at the Kaufman’s outrageous prices. No wonder the attendance wasn’t great…but after a blistering day, a cool breeze swept through the stadium and no one figured out how to charge for it!
Short but delightful stop at Westport Coffee, and a second visit to the Thomas Hart Benton home and studio—one of the most interesting sites in KC and not one that takes a great deal of time.
Photo of Harry S. Truman and Thomas Hart Benton posted in Benton’s studio
Our KC stay ended with a leisurely breakfast at First Watch (near the hotel), part of a chain we learned but with a real local flavor to it—great breakfast and the end for a while of our good conversations with good friends. Highlights: Marty to Clark: “Clark, stop talking to the other drivers. They can’t hear you and it makes your other passengers nervous!”
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We used to get from KC to Oxford in one day, but we find that jaunt a little daunting now, so we generally stop in Chesterfield (St. Louis), Missouri, making it an easy jaunt the next day. At the first exit past Boone’s Crossing there are a lot of motels, some with discounted prices, others not, and an easy route back to the crossing where there are lots of restaurants. I’m sure it sounds by now like we plan our trips around where we might eat next. Exactly!
‘Eat next’ proved to be at Zaxby’s in Blytheville. Okay, but wouldn’t try it again. So our real ‘eat next’ consisted of catfish at Taylor, just south of Oxford, down the all new Old Taylor Road, where we had the pleasure of a great set of table-mates, including two fellows, Tyler Mercer and Chris Dieman who, with the help of a fine Faulkner scholar from Fordham named Elizabeth Cornell, are adapting Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying for the stage. I was able to share a little about what they might want to check out in and around Oxford for background and they shared a couple of scene sketches—enough to know I’d really like to see the production. Thanks, Chris, for keeping us posted.
There’s often a “crew” that heads to Taylor on Saturday nights before the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference begins, and this year they were headed out as we got to the Inn at Ole Miss. Good friend Grayson Schick, along with long-time devotees Greg and Erlinda Perkins and our British friend Michael Wainwright waited about an hour on the restaurant porch, right across the street from where the original owner still lives, and filled out a table of nine—all of us sampling the menu’s rich variety: whole catfish, breaded catfish, blackened catfish, Cajun catfish, need I continue! (I think there might be something other than catfish on the menu but that’s all we’ve ever gone there to eat.) With real hush puppies, not the rocks usually sold as hush puppies, in direct contradiction of the scripture: which of you, if asked for bread, will give a stone instead?
Then, back to the Inn for one of the best of our long history of good conversations with Jim and Bev Carothers, Theresa Towner, and Jennie Joiner. Years ago, the Carothers had gifted us a drawing by Faulkner’s brother of a scene from “Red Leaves,” and now that we are downsizing a bit (emphasis on “a bit”), we in turn gave it to Jennie. Years ago, I’d helped steer her toward Jim and the graduate program at Kansas University, so she seemed the appropriate “heir” to the heirloom.
Next morning, Grayson, Nancy, and I met up with Jim and Bev at the home of the best blueberry muffins in the universe, Bottle Tree Bakery. Our colleague Terrell Tebbetts had gone earlier to St. Peter’s, but we all went to the late service for a packed church celebration of the Eucharist and fine sermon, and found we had to bolt out right after communion because of a prior luncheon date. We didn’t get to greet Jody Burnet, the Rector and the son of our former Bishop.
What a treat awaited us at Oxford’s Ravine restaurant just outside of town and scene of lots of the gatherings of the “Kansas/Nebraska Club” and its honorary members. Despite a tough year, Dale and Ann Abadie were able to come, Theresa Towner’s husband Steve joined us, Grayson and Jennie too, and our much-loved friend Colby Kullman, award winning Tennessee Williams scholar and teacher. This was something of a “send-off” for us since 2019 may well be our last FY conference and we are so grateful to Jim and Bev for setting it all up and for them and Theresa and Steve treating us.
Here we are, commandeering another wait staffer to take another picture
After brunch, got to take one more dip in the pool where son George first took a dive into a pool. Then a nap! Then scurried off to the traditional opening picnic to find it had been moved indoors because of threatening weather. Just as well. We wanted time with Grayson and were able to—let her take us to Old Venice, one of our favorite Oxford haunts and a darned good Italian food stop. Even got in a small dish of Ya-Ya’s frozen yogurt after.
We stayed only for the opening session on Monday, the Teaching Faulkner I took part in for about 30 years, this time just to listen to Theresa, Jim, and Terrell. We were sorry to have missed what several conferees told us were excellent presentations later in the week by
Robert Jackson from Tulsa U (he later sent me a copy and it opens up new ways of seeing Faulkner’s work), Jennie (chair at Keuka College), and Michael, as well as Tom McHaney’s Library Lecture, in part about another source for Faulkner’s Dilsey. Did get to say hi to Tom and Pearl in the breakfast room and enjoyed her comments at the Teaching Faulkner session, as well as those of Brian McDonald, and a local reporter snapped a photo of me with keynoter John Duvall—thanks Joan Wylie Hall for sending us a copy!
I have no doubt that we will miss this conference, an annual event in our lives for so long. Very grateful for Jim Carothers’s encomium at the close of the Teaching session. Jim marshalled some of what he felt I’d meant to the conference and to Faulkner studies over the years and I was humbled by hearing him claim I have been “One of the heroes of this conference”! Coming from one of the best of all Faulkner scholars and a founder of the society and its journal, I felt truly honored. His public encomium was nearly as moving as his personal remarks of what our friendship has meant when he and Bev and Nancy and I had lunch at the Ajax before we headed out. The Ajax, another restaurant proving that there is virtually no food that cannot be fried!
Short stay, so lots of places we didn’t get to, including Proud Larry’s where Bob Hamblin and I gave birth to A William Faulkner Encyclopedia.
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The drive to Memphis was uneventful—until the pelting rain began just as we were hitting the Interstate exchanges! The sun broke out as we were passing the Pyramid (now I gather a Bass Pro shop?) making it easy to find our motel, where our room had a great view of Mud Island and the I-40 bridge, which lights up at night. It’s just a short walk to Beale Street where we headed after the chief resource of travel: a nap.
Mud Island, where there was once a small airport where William Faulkner would take off and land
We’d been to B.B. King’s the last few visits so decided we’d try a new place. Our first choice, Blues City, was closed because they were filming some show there that evening—the equipment and the van it came in were in the blocked street and a crowd was watching the goings on while the technicians in the van were presumably watching the two girls who flashed them as they walked by, so we went to King Jerry’s just down the block.
Jerry was that breed of accomplished dissemblers that goes by the title “pro-wrestler.” Photos of his glory days hang on the walls. The BBQ was not great but good, plentiful, and not terribly expensive; but the entertainment, which is why we went there, was some of the best I’ve ever heard, fellow named Fuzzy Jeffries with a drummer and keyboard backup, and can that man not only sing and play the blues but take lots of standard pop and rock numbers and render them as blues.
Delightful time, followed by a little ice cream on the walk back to the motel, where we watched for a while the variations on the I-40 bridge lights and the steady stream of trucks heading into the night. Memphis is a work in progress, but it surely isn’t the city we drove into for the first time many years ago when we guessed that, what with Crump being a big political name, the avenue named for him would have to lead somewhere. Big mistake at the time and a further lesson in what apparently it did not mean to be a “big political name.”
The next morning was a choice: face the rush hour leaving Memphis or the rush hour entering Knoxville. We chose the devil we knew, left Memphis in traffic, and arrived in time to miss Knoxville’s rush. Before hitting the road, we ate in the motel breakfast room next to a table of four of Memphis’s finest, two older white men and two younger black women. One of the men made several chauvinistic comments during their conversation, comments we then commented on after they’d left. In turn, our comments drew remarks from a woman sitting next to us with her son. She, too, had been offended; she, too felt badly for the position the two women were in; and she had used the occasion as a teaching moment for her son, a moment our comments had reinforced! Good for her.
The principal purpose of going to Knoxville was to see our old friends Rod and Mary Moore and their children, Molly and James, and Molly’s Mavis and Zadie. Rod was one of my dad’s extraordinary group of men who studied with him and eventually entered the priesthood.
Like the 1915 class at West Point, that was a group the stars fell on. Dad had something of a record at the time for nurturing men into the ministry—all men in those days alas, until Rod’s own ministry set some new records: Rod not only nurtured even more people into ordained ministry but also holds the record for the number of women he led to ordination in the Diocese of Colorado. I’ve always considered him the best of the best. We’re even fraternity brothers and enjoyed sharing what we knew of our brothers and what became of them over the years. His life and ministry were both enriched by Mary’s wisdom and humor, and her long work as a nurse in many fine hospitals. James does the billboards for Pilot and other oil companies and Molly is, blessedly, a school librarian!
The Moore’s loaded us up in their van and gave us a day of sight-seeing around Knoxville, first to the church they now attend—beautiful stained glass up and down the nave, and then to Appalachian Village. Lunch was at Calhoun’s on the lake at Oak Ridge, the town famous for its physics laboratory and atomic testing institute, once presided over by Fr. Bill Pollard, physicist and Episcopal priest, who spoke at NU when I was an undergraduate at the invitation of Charles Patterson, my thesis director. Good news: none of us were “glowing” after lunch. Restaurant record for the longest wait time made up for by the largest servings!
Before lunch, however, we drove to Norris Dam, first of the series of Tennessee River dams that comprise the Tennessee Valley Authority, initiated by Nebraska’s Senator George Norris. Norris rescued the project for public benefit from the clutches of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who envisioned it for private profit. At the visitor center a video shows Nebraska’s own former legislator and Lincoln city official, David Landis, in his Chautauqua guise as Norris, explaining the whole project.
Having twice been asked to give the Norris Lecture at McCook’s annual heritage celebration, I thought it was about time I saw the actual project. Stunning fact: in 1910, while 90% of rural Japan was electrified, 30 and 40% of European countries like France and Belgium, only 10% of rural America enjoyed electrification. Norris did something about that and gave us a heritage that, sadly, the grandchildren of the farmers and ranchers that most benefited have turned their back on.
Norris Dam, looking back on the marina, the furthest upstream from the more famous Muscle Shoals
We left Knoxville with Rod’s copy of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy and the paper-flower bouquet Mavis made for us, promising to send Rod and Mary Ted Genoways’s This Blessed Earth. Rod grew up on a farm near Gresham. We have sent it, and he’ll love the book.
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If you are in Little Rock, I’d say the first place to go would be the Clinton Library. It’s an extraordinary building and display for our 2nd most popular President, right behind Ike. And, certainly, the second place to see would be the Little Rock high school where Orval Faubus made his segregationist stand and Ike stood up to him: Been there before, done both. So, this trip was to the third place to go: Does Eat Place.
In Deep South, Paul Theroux notes that this was Clinton’s favorite eating place. It is something of a hole in the wall but don’t let that deter you. We didn’t need a reservation (just two of us, a Thursday night) but I think a on a weekend or in a larger party you’d want to make a reservation.
Quite a menu. We didn’t have an appetizer, but there are a couple…the only one we saw people ordering was the tamales. There’s a small salad with a very tasty dressing. The specialty is steak, served family style, and outside of a filet, the smallest is the two-pound T-bone. With two vegetables: French Fried potatoes and small potatoes bathing in butter. And to compensate for the lack of carbohydrates, a piece of Texas Toast. We are not proud of cleaning our plates after first saying we could never eat all that. Well, actually, we are proud of it! The best steak I’ve ever had at a restaurant, and I’ve been to some pretty good steak houses. Very gratifying since a lot of our route was planned just to get to Does Eat Place.
Words cannot describe this place, not Paul Theroux’s or mine
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The trip home took us by Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Bartlesville shares something with Omaha—Omaha was the best little city Cargill could buy and Bartlesville was the best little town Phillips Petroleum could buy! Even though it’s no longer the Phillips HQ, there is still a sizeable footprint. We came this way to see Scott and Patty Taylor, and Patty-Cake the dog; he (Scott, not Patty-Cake) once worked in the oil industry but was the Disciples of Christ Pastor in Grand Island when I was at St. Stephen’s. While there he rejuvenated the CROP Walk and gave an annual concert in support of the Nebraska AIDS Project. Now retired, he showed us their recent work: the installation of solar panels on his roof and a Pioneer Inverter in their bedroom, along with the computer system that monitors both.
Scott was raised in Pennsylvania and tells a joke about “how in the world the Pennsylvania Turnpike found the only path through the state that didn’t have potholes”!
He sent home with me his Mss. of a book of his pastoral prayers and I’m hoping he’ll follow it up with another Mss. of his usual Sunday morning Facebook greetings: Good Morning Good People, a phrase borrowed from St. Francis.
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We made a last minute decision not to head north and stay in Wichita but,
rather, to head west and stay in Woodward, Oklahoma, where my dad was born—his
life-long complaint that he was born a week after the family moved into a house,
that is, one week too late to have been born in a covered wagon! It’s also where my dad’s dad is buried, and I
wanted the opportunity to visit the grave and see his and my step-grandmother Lela’s
old home.
We headed west on US Highway 60, only to find at some point we were no longer on it. We were on Oklahoma Highway 99 instead and missing a turn somewhere was one of those “fortunate falls” in life—I’d add the short strip of 99 down from 60 to 64 as one of the scenic by-ways of the country, like portions of Highway 30 in Pennsylvania or portions of Highways 2 and 92 in Nebraska. Gorgeous country, not at all what you think of further toward the panhandle and its red earth.
Great dinner that night at a Sam’s Southern Eatery, part of chain, this franchise in a non-descript building but with exceptionally friendly staff and wonderful baskets of fish and of chicken livers. (Iced up the take home and brought it home with us for a second and third meal!)
I’d called ahead and a very helpful clerk in the Court House had given me the coordinates to find the grave: number, section, lot, and block. “But,” she added, “there is a kiosk with a map out there, too.” Well, yes there is, although to the untrained eye of someone simply trying to find a grave the kiosk map and the coordinates bear very little resemblance to one another!
Still, it wasn’t for nothing that I’m the grandson of the man who built the power plant and elevator in Woodward that both withstood the 1950’s devastating tornado. We persisted! (Darn, there’s the politics creeping in again…and not a politics Granddad Peek would have been very happy with!)
Found the grave, took our pictures for our “family history” folders on the computer, and headed off to find a phone book at the local library so we could go find the house. Granddad Peek died in 1970 and it so happened the only phone book the otherwise very nice library had was for 1969. We were in luck, so headed off to see the house—which was not at the address printed in the phone directory. It was in the next block, and I knew it immediately, both from its looks and its roof.
When we’d been there for Granddad’s 90th birthday, he’d proudly asked us all to look at his new metal roof with its “lifetime” guarantee. “I sure hope,” said uncle Ralph, “that this means the roof’s lifetime and not Dad’s”! Quite the sense of humor our family enjoyed. I recognized the house also from its enclosed back porch where I’d slept when we would visit. On one occasion, there had been warnings about an escapee from a nearby mental hospital being at large. The back door didn’t lock, which wasn’t reassuring to a boy, and I woke in the middle of the night to see the escapee standing in the darkness right by the back door. What a moral dilemma for a boy. Set up a ruckus to warn the family and be his first victim? Or play dead and hope he’d never notice me on his way to victimize the rest of the family? Or, fret until there was enough morning light to see that the man by the door was Granddad’s hat and coat hanging loosely from the coat rack. Such are our little salvations!
And the yard was where I was taught to witch for water by Granddad’s second wife, Lela, and her sister Florence. “Hell, the whole yard is on a water table,” was my dad’s comment. Okay, but in fact Lela and Florence got paid only when they hit water and for a while made a living witching lots of farm wells in Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Just sayin’!
George W. Peek’s grave, with Lela and her sister Florence, the two smaller stones for Grace and Raymond, GWP and Zepher’s children who died in infancy.
Also stopped at the Plains Indians and Pioneers Museum to see if they had any information about Granddad or would like any that I could send them. Saturday is not a good day to ask questions to people staffing museums and libraries. They are there mostly to open the doors, turn on the lights, and show people where the restrooms can be found. Nice folk. Knew nothing. If you add to their number a lot of motel staff across the country, you encounter an irony. I’m thinking of those motel desk clerks whose employers save a couple of bucks by having only one person on at a time—checking in, checking out, answering the phone, answering questions, giving directions, setting up the breakfast room and keeping up with the breakfasters, etc. Travel teaches you at least one thing: the description of “service economy” is something of a double misnomer…the arrangements are lacking for providing service and the kind of economy we are creating by short-changing workers can been seen in the fungus-like spread of Dollar General stores.
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Fun travel moment on the way home: a sign that told us there was a “roadside table ahead.” Sure enough, a few miles more and there, by the side of the road, was the roadside table. These hearken to a day before rest stops on the interstate and plazas on the turnpikes. I commented that the fancier ones even had a canopy over the table, the canopy being a slanted, corrugated roof mounted on four 4×4’s. Sure enough again, not far down the road there were several tables together, each with its canopy.
Arrived home in time for a walk at Cottonmill Park, a lovely Eucharist the next morning at St. Luke’s, Rocket Man* at the World theater with friend Kate Benzel and our house guest the last few days we were away, Christina Seaborn, a musician with a magical touch on a violin. Christina used to play in our Carl Sandburg programs and lead our local “fiddle camp.” This year she “fiddled” with Blue Plate Special in the next-to-last Sunday evening concert in Harmon Park.
Then, as we hurtled toward our next jaunt, we enjoyed Humanities Nebraska’s outstanding Chautauqua series called Focus on the Fifties, including a first-rate talk on Ike at the Merryman Performing Arts Center by Virginia historian William Hitchcock, break-out discussions on various topics the next day at Kearney Public Library (a fine one on Rock and Roll!), followed by the representations of Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall to a packed house at the World Theater.
We had left too early to be there for the memorial service for Stan Longfellow, former colleague and father of one of our son’s friends, and we were too late in getting home to be there for the funeral of long-time parishioner Verna Barney, but we were in time to attend the funeral for Dick Cloyed, former colleague at the University, fellow builder of KCT sets, former layer of my front walk. And in time for me to preach at the funeral for Wayne McKinney, another long-time parishioner and banker, who had done more good around here than we could count.
We also managed some time with friends: one of the Chautauqua events with Stan and Carol Dart, an outing to the Night Market with Jerry, Janet, and Gregory Fox, a visit with Tom and Susie Miles, a short visit with Carla Brooke, Jim and Don at church, dinner with Jack McSweeney and Janice Wiebusch, Carla Brooke, and Rosemary Northwall, lunch with Bobbie and Rachel Fox and their granddaughter Angela, and going down to the railroad crossing with Linda, Michael, Michelle, and Maxwell Anderson, Rosemary Northwall and Mary Haeberle, to see Big Boy, a steam locomotive stopping here on its way back to Wyoming. Also saw Clark Swisher and his Harley for an overnight stop as he traveled from Columbia, Missouri, to Sturgis for his 49th biker bash, dinner at El Toro in Grand Island (after the “straight” wind storm twisted up hundreds of its trees) for dinner with Jim Schmitt, and coffee with Danny and Vicki Robinson as they passed through from camping in Wyoming and points west and headed to Milwaukee to watch the Brewers—Danny was a student of mine in Flagstaff and we had a special bond then…so great to see him again and meet his wife.
The locomotive, incidentally, was manufactured in Schenectady, New York, and entered into service in 1941, plenty of time for it to have been one of the engines that hauled trains across the plains in my childhood, trains I rode on back and forth from Evanston, Illinois, to Greeley, Colorado. Seeing the number of youngsters whose parents and grandparents had brought them to the crossing, I was reminded how monstrously big those old engines seemed when you were a small child. And how loud. And how we’d pile in Doc Urie’s Buick to drive down and watch them roll through.
September blog: More travel tales: Cedar Bluffs (read children and grandchildren), Des Moines for lunch with JoAn Van Balen and Siobhan, Iowa City eye care, Milwaukee (read children and grandchildren again), La Crosse for coffee with Jack and Janice, Clear Lake for a visit with my cousin Dottie and half her family, Minneapolis for a visit with George Day, home.
*PS Rocket Man may be the first movie I’ve ever seen that I thought actually caught the essence of twelve-step recovery programs! That may be worth a blog later in the year.
Kearney, Nebraska
August 2019
capeek 