People of Whistle Stop

“One day Cleo was going out the door and he pointed up to where all the old blackbirds were sitting on a telephone wire in front of our house, and he’d say, ‘Be careful what you say on the phone today, Ninny, you know they’re up there listening to what you say. They can hear through their feet.’”

A couple of days after Christmas a friend and I spent a day in New Orleans browsing the bookstores, pawing through countless dusty shelves looking for the hidden treasure that suddenly peeps out from a dark hiding place between two run-of the-mill titles. If you’re lucky, three or four rare finds make their way to the light over the course of a day and the hour after hour bending, reaching, standing and crouching becomes worthwhile. A long time back—around 1990 or so—I read a cheap little paperback book that grabbed me so solidly I was unable to get out of my chair, moving over the course of several hours only to turn on the lamp as the sun faded. Obviously, the book was what some reviewers are quick to call ‘a page-turner.’ What a bland description for a book so rich in story and character, one that prompts laughter on one page and tears on the next. The book that captured me so completely that day was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, published in 1987 by Random House. On that recent book browsing day in New Orleans one of the treasures that came into my hands was a first edition hardback copy in almost mint condition.

Though the author of six books, most of us remember Fannie Flagg as co-host of television’s Candid Camera with Allen Funt back in the 1970s. She has enjoyed a long career as not just a writer, but as a performer on Broadway, television and in film. Flagg used the small town of Irondale, a suburb of her hometown Birmingham, Alabama as a model for the 1987 book that spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.

The story of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe revolves around the people of tiny Whistle Stop, Alabama, mainly the Threadgoode family and the people who eat at the cafe, but as the characters move in out and around their small town, the setting follows their movement. The main thrust of the tale is seen (and told) from the perspective and reminiscences of Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly member of the Threadgoode family residing in the Rose Terrace Nursing Home and talking to her new friend, Evelyn Couch, a Birmingham housewife. Oddities and tidbits about Whistle Stop are also shown through regular offerings from post office clerk Dot Weems writing in the town’s weekly bulletin. The book’s major focus is Idgie Threadgoode and her lifelong friend and companion, Ruth Jamison, the two women who open the Whistle Stop Cafe in 1929. But their lives and the cafe are intertwined with a host of more than a dozen characters that give the book its color and multiplicity of themes. First there is the issue of two women living together as a couple—Idgie the lifelong tomboy and Ruth, the gentle beauty escaping a drunk and abusive husband. The life and condition of southern blacks during the period from the 1920s through the ’80s is another of Flagg’s main themes, as is aging, death and acceptance. Then there is the question of whether murder can be justified under extreme conditions. And naturally, since much of the action takes place in a cafe, food and eating is another of the book's prominent motifs. (The last pages of the book are a collection of recipes from the Whistle Stop’s old black cook, Sipsey.)

One of the more enjoyable qualities of this small journey over time is the collection of individual voices created for the characters. Hard perhaps to find another character in literature that colors language like Idgie Threadgoode, one minute irreverent, the next gentle and understanding, at all times a fount of southern idiom, most of it masculine. Testifying in court she calls the prosecutor a “…gump-faced, blowed up, baboon-assed bastard.” Harper Lee once described Idgie as a woman Huck Finn would have tried to marry. Her friend Ruth is given the gentle vocal rhythms of a Sunday school teacher, a twentieth century Melanie Wilkes from Gone with the Wind. The elderly Ninny, who at times unknowingly wears her dress inside out, describes the girl in the beauty shop, saying, “Oh, she was a full-grown woman, only she was tiny, she had to stand on a box while she did my hair. I’d say she was about two inches away from being a midget. Of course, I don’t let any handicap like that bother me, and I love a midget…I wonder what ever happened to that little midget that sold cigarettes on the radio and TV. I used to get the biggest kick out of him…always wished he’d come to Whistle Stop so I could sit him on my lap and play with him.”

In these days when most news headlines scream of death and carnage, shootings and stabbings, when events all seem shaped out of remnants from the Dark Ages, it is comforting to stumble upon stories of a gentler time when people didn’t offer insult and abuse on every corner, when there was never a need to lock doors or lose yourself in small screens and earphones. In her book about Idgie Threadgoode and Whistle Stop, Alabama Fannie Flagg coaxes us back to that time before, bringing to her readers equal portions of delight and anguish, the daily turnings that made up life for a different kind of townsfolk.

Feline Watchmen

During this time of visiting friends in Baton Rouge, staying in their home I have shared space with a couple of furry friends named Gumbo and Memphis. A little standoffish the first week or so, they have gradually come to trust me. In the pictures below the two of them wait out a rainy day, looking every which way for the sunshine and a chance to get outside. 

Mo-Tel

Memories with much detail are hard to dredge up about many of the times in childhood that we all piled in the family car, a black 1948 Chevrolet and headed out for several days on the road aiming for the homes of distant relatives or joining the tourists to gawk at the mysteries of Mammoth Cave or the grandeur of Pike’s Peak. The most endurable memories of those times are the Burma Shave signs, the ever-present Stuckey’s around the next curve and the car games we played, making words from the letters glimpsed on fleeting roadside signs and billboards. Certainly we stayed nights in motels along the way, but mental pictures of those temporary stops have all but disappeared. We never stayed in any of the wigwam-style rooms, but in one place Daddy chose a log cabin court under flashing neon where at dinner the friendly and helpful waitress took the story about my fondness for rice and gravy to heart. Dessert included a bowl of raisin-studded rice pudding with a slosh of chicken gravy on top—just for me.

The Writer’s Almanac recently carried an interesting tidbit about the world’s first motel, planting the word in my head and nagging me to pursue this ‘first motel’ story farther. 

The Milestone Mo-Tel opened in San Luis Obispo, California in 1925, brainchild of California architect Arthur Heineman and the first roadside accommodation for travelers in the world. Heineman wasn't exactly going out on a limb with his venture. 1925 was a time when cars and road trips were enjoying new popularity and overnight rest options were limited; people either slept in their car or stopped at one of the few campsites or auto camps. Heineman decided to build a group of one-story bungalows 200 miles north of Los Angeles, each bungalow set around a tree shaded courtyard and allowing guests their own small garage. The price for a one-night stay was $1.25. The motel was built in an ornate Spanish mission style with white pillars and a three-tiered bell tower at a cost of $80,000, not more than fifty feet from Highway 101 skirting the California coast. Amenities included a restaurant famous for its steak and pretty young waitresses in Spanish outfits and big vaquero hats. Marcella Faust, one of the motel’s first employees described her days at the Milestone this way: “My sister and I and a girlfriend all worked there. My mother, she wanted me to finish school. But I wanted to work. She had eight kids and I told her there were enough legs under her kitchen table. And oh, it was wonderful to work. They trained us to fold the white linen napkins, to polish the silverware. In those days, there really was service. We were paid a dollar a day.”

The Depression years were hard ones for Heineman and his plan to open a string of motels up and down the California coast was never realized. There were also other developers who saw the sense in Heineman’s vision and imitators weren’t long in cropping up along America's highways. 

Today the Milestone Mo-Tel is a sad site of crumbling plaster and old furniture piled up in a dusty lobby. Many of the buildings were torn down in 2006 and only two fragments of the original buildings remain, including the bell tower. The motel closed in 1991 and is now used as an administrative building by a next door business.

Another example of Arthur Heineman’s work is the Fuller House in Los Angeles, sitting on almost three-quarters of an acre near Runyon Canyon off Franklin Avenue, the house was built in 1916 for a Hollywood developer named Fuller. It was designed by Arthur Heineman, who with his brother Alfred, designed several mansions and bungalows in the area. Samuel Goldwyn moved into the house with his second wife in 1925. It includes seven bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, a dining room with butler’s pantry, a screening room, sunroom, breakfast room, tile fireplaces, a guesthouse, pool and outdoor living room.

On Familiar Terms

Can’t claim the title above as my own, but on this afternoon in early December the words seemed just right and a tiny borrowing is harmless enough. Among his many books, Donald Keene wrote in 1996 one called On Familiar Terms, a series of essays describing a few of the people and experiences of his time in Japan. Far from Japan and back again on home ground in Louisiana, everything is once more familiar and to large extent an overflow of sensory impressions. Sights and sounds, southern voices overheard, their rhythm and drawl calling up memories of remembered aunts and uncles playing cards at the kitchen table; conversation with friends so enduring that words take on a meaning enriched by time and place and the Christmas table holds promise of not sugar plums and a gingerbread house, but of crawfish pie, po-boys and oyster stew.

Hard to remember the last Christmas I passed in Baton Rouge, but something tells me it was before the invention of ballpoint pens and color television. One Louisiana Christmas that for no special reason sticks in memory calls up images of an ugly brown suit and too much bourbon-laced eggnog. And here I am back again for Christmas with the friend who stood beside me singing carols, had no ugly brown suit but loved the eggnog as much as I. Back for Christmas with the girl I dated but the one that eggnog-loving friend married. With or without the eggnog, Christmas or otherwise, a season with Raymond & Dee is living life grand.

On most mornings my feet find a path along stretches of Florida sand, but this morning it was a different walk along familiar streets with ribbon-wrapped trees and pudgy snowmen decorating the homes of Old Goodwood. The nine months since my last visit have brought some change to those streets and houses. Landscapers have reshaped yards and contractors have both spruced up and added on, but the splendor of huge old oak trees overhanging streets and drooping their branches low over sidewalks is unchanged. Reading David Mitchell’s book Black Swan Green the other day, these words jumped off the page: “Trees’re always a relief, after people.”

Memory Paintings

She is often referred to as the black Grandma Moses, but the ‘Americana’ of Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter is a strong reflection of African influences with its use of bold color, pattern, stylized imagery, and stacked perspective. The artist called her works memory paintings because they depict scenes of everyday life around the plantation and her church. Asked the title of a painting she would describe instead what it was about, rarely thinking in terms of a name. The titles we see given to her paintings were most often applied by her white patrons.

Clementine Hunter (she pronounced it Clementeen) was born in 1886 on a cotton plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. At the age of five her family moved to another plantation in the Cane River area of Natchitoches Parish, where she first attended school. Clementine never liked school, often failing to attend until her parents gave up on sending her. When she was fourteen the family moved again, this time to Melrose Plantation, another Cane River plantation dating from the late 1700s. The owners of Melrose hoped to preserve the arts and crafts of the Cane River area, and as a result the plantation became over the years a haven for artists and writers. Clementine and her family worked in the cotton fields and the pecan groves, but when she reached the age of forty-two Clementine moved from field work to house work.

Gone Fishing, 1950s; a day on Cane River with everybody fishing in their Sunday best.

Several years later a man named Francois Mignon joined the Melrose family as a literary assistant to the owner. He recognized the creativity of Clementine, offering daily encouragement. When a New Orleans artist visited the plantation to paint magnolias, she left behind several tubes of paint. Finding the paints, Clementine approached Mignon saying she could “mark” a picture of her own, and he gave her an old window shade, some brushes and turpentine. The very next morning, she brought him a picture. In the years following, she painted whenever she had time, on anything she could find—from cardboard boxes, brown paper bags, lumber, to plastic milk cartons and wine bottles. 

Cotton Crucifixion, 1970; oil on paper

Over the next forty plus years she produced 4000 paintings, each one telling in a simple, straightforward way a story of life as she saw it. Though illiterate, her paintings are a storybook of everyday life on and around the plantation. The artist died on New Year’s Day, 1988 and was buried near Melrose Plantation in a spot close to Francois Mignon, the man who believed so strongly in her talent.

Zinnias in a Pot, 1965; return to a favorite theme first seen in 1939

Milking Time, 1940s; asked why the cow had only three legs, the artist reasoned that the milking stool only needed three legs, so the cow only needed three legs.

The painting at the top is a large mural titled Baptism, done in 1955 and now in African House on the grounds of Melrose Plantation.

Symphonic Orangutans

In Japan, families traditionally gather in late December to celebrate the passage of the old year and arrival of the new. True of yearend in most countries, a variety of customs earmark the season and one of those involves the family watching together two or three popular and long-running television shows. The most popular of those has long been the celebrity heavy New Year’s Eve broadcast of  Kôhaku Uta Gassen or Red and White Song Battle. Another late December show that has been wildly popular since its debut in 1979 is Kinchan & Katori Shingo no Zen-Nihon Kasô Taishô, a pantomime contest exhibiting the passion and cleverness of amateur performers. Kasô Taishô translates as something along the lines of “masquerade belly laughs.”

The performers display a fun and often hilarious series of masquerades using precision choreography, goofy ideas, cute kids or clever visualizations. Imagine a parade of sight gags concocted by Monty Python, Terry Gilliam and French film director Michel Gondry and produced by Chuck Barris of The Gong Show. In addition to making their own costumes and props, contestants work hard to create an unusual, weird, wacky and very original idea, bringing it to life in a jaw-dropping performance.

Teams vary in number from individuals to school groups. Celebrity judges in crazy costumes vote at the end of each skit, the total score appearing in an onstage flashing tower of bells and lights. Contestants getting votes above fourteen qualify for big cash prizes but the large number of prizes almost guarantee that everyone is a winner. The top prize is a whopping ¥1 million, almost $12,600.

Have a look at three short examples…

A CHILLY WIND

ORANGUTAN CONDUCTOR 

KENDAMA NOTES  (Kendama refers to a cup and ball toy)

Laugh

Volkswagen has a commercial on television these days which makes the point that ‘It’s not the miles, it’s how you live them.’ Not a gag or joke type of sales pitch, but if this one doesn’t make you laugh maybe you need to go in for a tune up.