The State vs. The Minister’s Tree House: Earthly Codes

April 8, 2013

The good news is that the Minister’s Tree House will reopen.

The bad news is that the Minister doesn’t yet know when that will be.

Always popular with visitors, the giant tree house built by minister Horace Burgess was shut down by the Tennessee state fire marshal in August 2012. Horace, since then, has worked steadily to bring the tree house into compliance with Tennessee’s building codes, even though the state admits that it has no building codes for tree houses.

Some visitors, stopping at the locked gate outside the tree house, have seen piles of scrap at the base of the tree and assumed, to their alarm, that the house was being torn down. Horace, who sounded exhausted when we spoke with him, assured us that what they saw were just old pieces that he was replacing so that the tree house can reopen.

Whenever that will be, the tree house will not be as free-spirited as before. Visitors will have to read a set of posted rules and sign a waiver indemnifying Horace if they break them (or themselves). There will be an admission fee. There will be someone on hand to ensure that the tree house does not exceed its maximum capacity, although that capacity has yet to be determined.

Horace likes to point out that the tree house had a spotless safety record even in an absence of codes and rules. He attributes that to God. “But now that Man’s messing with it,” he said, “I’m gonna have to go their way, all the way.” Horace would rather not, but he knows that he must to get the tree house open again. “I think God was sending people,” he said, “so I want to get it where He can send some more.”

The minister isn’t the only one anxious to reopen the tree house. Horace wryly placed a sign on the locked gate with the phone number of the state fire marshal. It has had its intended effect. “The last time I talked to him,” said Horace, “he was just getting inundated with calls. He said, ‘We’re gonna have to resolve this as soon as possible.’”

Horace understands that bureaucracy is slow. He’s under no illusion that the tree house will reopen as quickly as he thinks it should. All he knows for sure is that it will reopen, maybe sooner, maybe later; he just doesn’t know when. “I don’t want the tree house to just sit there,” Horace said. “It’d be a waste if people didn’t get to enjoy it. So I’m just gonna work it out so they can enjoy it, the best way I can.”

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Saloon Cowboy: A 21st Century Muffler Man

April 5, 2013

“We sell the same Bud Lite as all 400 other bars in this county,” said Justin Carter, general manager of the Copperhead Road Honkey Tonk Saloon in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We were looking for something outdoors to set us apart.”

The problem, said Justin, was that Colorado Springs has a very restrictive ordinance on signs. So he built Colorado Redneck Stonehenge, three rusty old cars arranged in a gateway arch at the edge of the parking lot. Justin told the city that it wasn’t a sign; it was art. Colorado Springs replied that it wasn’t a sign and it wasn’t art, either. It was junk, and since the Saloon didn’t have a junkyard permit, it had to be torn down.

Justin moved to Plan B. Statues, he realized, were recognized as statues by everyone, and didn’t fall under the sign ordinance. And the biggest statue he could imagine was a Muffler Man.

“We’d seen a bunch of them on Roadside America,” he said, particularly one that was customized to hold a cigar and a foamy mug of beer in Sturgis, South Dakota. Justin decided that he wanted one just like that.

Rather than modify an existing Muffler Man, Justin turned to FAST in Sparta, Wisconsin, specialists in giant fiberglass sculptures and one of the few companies capable of creating a Muffler Man from scratch (Its Mold Yard is a priceless resource). He showed FAST a photo of the Sturgis Muffler Man, and in 2012 FAST delivered the Copperhead Road Cowboy to Justin’s saloon.

The Cowboy is accessorized with an electric guitar as well as the mug and stogie. His arms are not as muscular as a classic Muffler Man, his shoulders not as broad. His compact, square head has less pronounced brow ridges, with a more pointed nose, thinner lips, and a wider mouth. His jaw is not as prominent. For better or worse he looks more human than an old-style Muffler Man, but the geneticists at FAST have placed him squarely among the species.

Justin told us that he’s considering making seasonal outfits for the Cowboy, and building a photo-op platform between his legs for shutterbugs. Pushing his luck with the statue gambit, he also put a rearing fiberglass stallion on the roof of the saloon, painted its genitals pink, and lit them with spotlights. The city rolled its eyes, told Justin he could keep the horse, but made him turn off the lights.

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Lanny Dean and His Merry Band of Tornado-Chasers

April 3, 2013

Lanny Dean had a hoarse throat when we spoke. Maybe from screaming “Agggh! Tornado!!!” He said no, it was just from speaking to so many customers. Tornado season is his busy time.

Lanny runs Extreme Chase Tours. He puts people in a minivan, then races them all over the Great Plains — from Texas to the Canadian border — six to fifteen days at a stretch, hunting tornadoes. Lanny has personally seen over 300 twisters, and told us that his tours have a 99 percent success rate.

The tours cost several grand, but you could spend as much on a fancy cruise or a week at Disney World, and never come home with a video of one tornado to show for it.

Tour-goers pay in advance — peak season almost always sells out — and then rendezvous at a motel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a meet-and-greet briefing with Lanny’s guides. Warnings are issued to pack lightly, prepare for long hours of sitting, and to mentally ready yourself for rough roads and no bathrooms (sounds like a Team Roadside research trip). The next morning they race off, following mobile radar and their guides’ intuition to wherever twisters are most likely to appear.

Tour-goers also must sign a liability waver that protects Extreme Chase Tours in case they die. Lanny said that no fatalities have occurred. He personally has had his car flipped by one tornado, and had a tooth knocked out by another, but he knows that it’s bad business to kill your customers (although all deposits are non-refundable).

Thrillseekers and adrenaline junkies usually book with Lanny during his “Mayhem 4″ tours in May. We asked Lanny if he’d ever had a problem with customers acting reckless, and he said no. “Once in a while you get someone who’ll say they want to get really close,” he said with a chuckle. “But you get them remotely close, a quarter-mile away, and they’re freakin’ out. There’s no way they’re getting out of the vehicle.”

Back in 1991, when Lanny began chasing tornadoes, he was considered crazy. The success of the movie Twister put more people like Lanny on the road, and the recent popularity of reality series such as Storm Chasers have literally created traffic jams of fans around some tornadoes.

Bad weather can strike almost anywhere. What should normal people do if a storm was brewing and they saw an Extreme Chase Tours van on the road?

“If you see my van in your town,” Lanny said, “I’m there for a reason. Go home.”

[Extreme Chase Tours: 918-859-0248 - extremechasetours.com. Tour-goers usually rendezvous at the Sand Springs Hampton Inn. US Hwy 64/412. Exit at S. 81st W. Ave. Drive north one block, then turn right (east) onto West Parkway Blvd. Hampton Inn ahead on the right.]

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Next Guardian Of The Wonder Tower: It Could Be You

March 27, 2013

If you’ve ever wanted to hop off the modern-times treadmill and dial back the speed of life, this could be your chance.

You could be the next keeper of the Genoa, Colorado, Wonder Tower.

The Wonder Tower has been a tourist attraction longer than most people on earth have been alive. Charles W. Gregory built the Tower in 1926, claiming that its observation deck was the highest point between New York City and Denver (For those unfamiliar, the Wonder Tower stands in eastern Colorado, which is as flat as western Kansas).

Jerry Chubbuck is the Tower’s current caretaker. He’s packed it with collections of bottles, arrowheads, and mysterious bric-a-brac. But Jerry is well past retirement age, and in 2012 he hoped to find a buyer for the Tower by the end of the summer. When a worthy candidate failed to materialize, Jerry stayed on.

2013 finds him back in his usual spot, regaling visitors with time-worn gags, posing for photos, and assessing every visitor’s potential.

“Most people just want this and that,” Jerry said of the prospective buyers. “Some want the arrowheads. Some want the bottles. Everybody wants the moose in the back.” But Jerry doesn’t want a cherry-picker. He wants to find a person who will continue the dynasty, who will vouchsafe the Wonder Tower like the generations of knights who kept watch over the Holy Grail.

This isn’t a short-term gig. Jerry has been at the Wonder Tower since 1967.

“One family came in,” Jerry said. “A really bad day. Really cold and terrible. And they stayed two hours, at least! And they wanted to come back when it warms up, and take another look, and they were talking like they just wanted to buy the whole place. That would be wonderful.”

Jerry is usually at the Wonder Tower every day from 9 to 5 when the weather is warm, running it as a tourist attraction. If the weather is cold, just give him a call in advance and he might open the Tower. But be warned: Jerry will be studying you, and if he feels that you’re The One, you may be staying longer than you’d anticipated.

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Curing Gnometropy: Rock City’s Statue Doctor

March 20, 2013

For over 80 years Rock City on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, has been surprising travelers with a mix of engineered/augmented natural beauty — and gnomes. And creepy fairy-tale figures in a one-of-a-kind black light cave.

Nature has a way of taking care of itself, but who tackles the ravages of gnometropy and elven decay?

It turns out that Matthew Dutton does.

Matt has been Rock City’s resident art specialist since 2010. His jobs are many, but his oddest is as the attraction’s one-man repair crew for gnomes and fairyland figures.

“There’s wasn’t anybody in my shop for ten years before I got there,” said Matt of the Rock City building that he’s christened the Gnome Infirmary.

“It was like a vault; things had kinda been left in there to forget.” Luckily, the dusty shop included a big file cabinet packed with ancient Rock City photos, brochures, and postcards. Matt uses these as references in his quest to restore the attraction’s miniature figures to their original splendor.

They needed help. Many are as old as Rock City — which opened in 1932 — and are made of a plaster-like material that soaks up moisture, gets brittle, then makes the statues’ arms and legs fall off. “A figure the size of a baby will weigh, like, 60 pounds,” said Matt. Despite his background in fine art and sculpting, Matt has had to learn on the fly how to retrofit the little creatures, using everything from epoxy to internal ligatures, and always with a lot of sanding and scraping. “Trial and error,” he said. “There wasn’t a gnome repair class.”

Matt’s greatest challenge lies in restoring the black light inhabitants of Rock City’s Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village, probably the greatest — and oldest — subterranean showcase of UV sculpture on Earth. “Black light is weird, a totally different spectrum of color,” said Matt. “Whenever you bring a Mother Goose character out in the daylight, it just looks horrible. The skin tones are super-super orange, whites are black, blacks are white.”

Fortunately for the artisan, his workshop was outfitted by some long-ago inhabitant to convert to black light at the flick of a switch. “The first time I did that I thought, wow, this place just upped the ante on Creepville,” said Matt. “But it’s super helpful. I have to work under UV to get the colors right; that’s the only way to do it.”

Matt loves his job and is spearheading Rock City’s new Gnome Valley project, which will eventually populate an entire section of the property with gnomes that Matt is creating. “It’s gonna be a long work in progress,” he said. “There’s a lot of room and gnomes aren’t very big.” On his off-hours Matt creates Phigments, creatures that have human baby faces on alien animal bodies.

The revival of black light attractions — particularly those with new LED UV lights that really punch up the colors — has spurred Rock City to revive its glow-in-the-dark art, but both Matt and Rock City recognize that Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village may need some historical context — perhaps conveyed with helpful signs — to keep it from alarming the public.

“You’ve got a generation that’s into Japanimation, a totally different cartoon aesthetic,” said Matt. “Maybe back in the day these figures weren’t creepy at all, but now they’re so out of the norm. You want to preserve what’s there, but at the same time you don’t want freak people out. You want to say, ‘These were all intentionally like this,’ not, ‘We’re crazy.’”

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High Caliber Politics In Kentucky: Hitler Plaque, Assassination Relics

March 11, 2013

For five years the castle-like Kentucky Military History Museum — formerly the State Arsenal — has been open only sporadically. $2 million has been spent over that time to restore it to its fortress 1850 appearance, a looming presence on a hill overlooking the state capitol in Frankfort.

The building was finally opened on March 9, bringing artifacts back to the public that had been out of sight for too long. Most infamous is a metal plaque, yanked off a wall in Germany’s Landsberg prison, honoring its most celebrated inmate: Adolf Hitler. When Hitler came to power his former cell was made into a shrine, with the plaque bolted above the door.

According to Trevor Jones, director of museum collections and exhibitions for the Kentucky Historical Society, the plaque is in a Kentucky museum because the guy who took it was a colonel from Kentucky. “You can see the pry marks where they wrenched that thing off the wall; it must weigh 60 pounds,” said Trevor.

The plaque, he said, translates as follows: Here a dishonorable system imprisoned Germany’s greatest son from 11 November 1923 until 20 December 1924. In this cell, Adolf Hitler wrote the book of the National Socialist revolution: My Struggle.

Local heroes also feature prominently in the museum’s collection, although not always in ways that they would have liked. Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s shoes are displayed, as is the pocket watch carried by non-Confederate President Abraham Lincoln on the night he was assassinated (The Smithsonian claims to have all of Lincoln’s assassination artifacts, but they missed a few).

Most relevant to the building are the many death relics of William Goebel, who was shot outside the state capitol, sworn in as Kentucky’s governor the next day, and died two days after that (A plaque on the ground marks the spot where he fell). According to Trevor, the assassination — which happened in 1900 — was a political power struggle that immediately focused attention on the Arsenal building, where all the military equipment in Kentucky was stored.

“They buried land mines around the building to prevent a second Civil War,” said Trevor. The museum’s restoration had to take this into account, said Trevor, keeping someone on hand at all times “just in case we dug up something.” Nothing combustible was found, but the Kentucky Military History Museum is one attraction where you may definitely want to stay on the sidewalk and keep off the grass.

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