iPhone App 1.5 Bonus: Canada! And…No Subscriptions

December 12, 2011

Just released: the latest update to the Roadside America App for iPhone, v1.5. We thought this would be a nice holiday bonus for iPhone users. Major improvements include the addition of Canada attractions, the reworking of where maps appear, and the end of “subscriptions.”

• Canada: All provinces added as a single region, and also part of the new “All Access” option. Current, unexpired subscribers to US Access are upgraded to All Access in v1.5 and get Canada for free.
• A la Carte Regions: Now 1-region users can purchase individual additional regions.
• Subscriptions Eliminated: Purchases in 1.5 won’t expire.
• Maps: Now accessible from any list view, showing the attractions in that list.
• Sunset Alert: Can be set to repeat daily. This alert type and Tourist Interruptus no longer require an active network connection.

We also performed a number of fixes and tweaks, such as pull-to-refresh a list, and metric support for devices set to metric.

See some 1.5 screen views. More about the App: RoadsideAmerica.com/mobile/

Roadside America 1.5 for iPhone is available on the App Store.

Sections: Canada, Trip Tools
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Aquarena Springs DVD – Ralph the Diving Pig

November 28, 2011

It’s hard to find an American tourist attraction more legendary than Aquarena Springs, San Marcos, Texas. For a time, it was second only to the Alamo as the Lone Star state’s most popular destination. Where else could you see a pig swim with mermaids, or Glurpo the Clown smoke underwater?

The family-owned theme park, sold in 1994 (its theme park elements closed by 1996), is still a vital memory for generations of Texans and out-of-state visitors. Very special for us, as well — it was one of Roadside America‘s “Seven Wonders” in our first book.

A new DVD documentary, “Aquarena Springs and Ralph the Swimming Pig,” provides a fun and sentimental portrait of this lost “Texas Treasure.”

Bob Phillips wrote/directed/edited the film, assembled from archival photos, home movies and videos, and interviews he conducted with key figures — former employees, managers and fans of Aquarena Springs, even some mermaids and Glurpos. Bob is the son of Gene Phillips, who was pivotal in managing Aquarena Springs in the 1970s and ’80s, when attendance approached 350,000 per year.

Like many popular roadside attractions, Aquarena Springs started as a family venture that grew over successive generations. In 1929, J.G. Rogers opened a hotel resort at the headwaters of the San Marcos River in San Marcos. By 1946, son Paul Rogers was introducing the first glass bottom boat into the springs.

The DVD is porkroll-stuffed with details about the evolution of the attraction, which eventually included a mock western village, a Swiss skyride, a gator show, and various performing animals. The centerpiece was the “World’s Only Submarine Theater,” a marvel of engineering that would blow ballast and submerge an audience below the water. After it was opened in 1950, the submarine theater garnered wide attention — years later, we found it featured on the cover of a 1952 Popular Mechanics magazine (which also appears in the film).

Aquarena always had some new stunt to attract media interest — in the early 1950s it hosted the first underwater wedding, reported in Life magazine (to prevent the wedding gown from floating up over the bride’s face, small lead balls were sewn into the hem),

The mermaids and their underwater maneuvers were part of a show repeated several times daily. Aqua-Miss Margaret Russell taught the mermaids some of the techniques she brought from water show stints in Florida. In the film, veteran aquamaids talk about the underwater picnic routine, avoiding the Spring’s scary big catfish, and explain how to drink from a Coca Cola bottle while immersed in liquid.

Aquarena’s greatest roadside triumph was the inclusion of a pig in every submarine theater performance. “Ralph” would run down the volcano ramp and execute a “swine dive” into the Springs, then swim, as the theater slowly submerged. The documentary provides all the details — the training and feeding, the special between-show retreat (“Ralph’s Pig Palace”).

Many of the interviews are shot at an on-site reunion, veteran employees wistfully recalling time spent in a magical place. At one point, a 1950s era Glurpo, Robert Cox, mentions his “smoking underwater” trick, then pauses and asks someone off-camera (probably Bob Phillips) “You want me to tell the secret?”

“Yea. Tell the secret!” And Robert does.

No spoilers here — you’ll have to buy the DVD.

(“Aquarena Springs and Ralph the Swimming Pig,” $19.95, Standard NTSC DVD – Time: 78 minutes — Order info at: http://www.aquarenaandralph.com)

Sections: Video
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Needs Two Roofs, Will Sell One Finger

October 28, 2011

It hasn’t been easy for Johnny F. Baker, founder of Baker’s Junction Railroad Museum in Smithville, Indiana. By his own reckoning he has survived bone cancer and over 30 operations, lost his hip and leg bone and a few other parts, and had his right foot torn off and reattached.

Then last year he cut off his finger.

While working on repairs to the museum “I was using a circular saw over my head,” he recalled, “but I only have one leg and the knee gave out and I fell and the saw cut my finger off.”

Johnny grabbed a Coke he’d been drinking and dropped the finger in with the ice, but by the time he arrived at the nearest hospital the digit was too far gone to be saved.

So — Johnny put the finger in his pocket and decided he would mummify it as a keepsake. “It was surprisingly easy,” he said. He packed the finger in salt for a few weeks, then sealed it in clear acrylic and turned it into a key chain. It was never far from the hand it had once called home.

But Johnny has had other problems as well — and that’s what’s prompted him to do the unthinkable: sell his finger. Johnny needs $10,000 to put new roofs on the two railroad stations at his railroad museum. He said he’d had a solid offer on eBay, but  the auction had been cancelled on the final day as part of eBay’s new “no human body parts” policy. Now he wants to put the word out to railroad buffs: if you want to help save this museum, buy my finger.

The finger, to be frank, is more a finger tip — but Johnny did a good job of preservation, with his fingernail still clearly visible. He said that he now keeps it in a locked glass case in the museum, which displays other “weird stuff” that he’s collected as well as railroad artifacts. When we asked him to describe something weird, he mentioned a naturally mummified possum that he’d found under one of the train stations that he subsequently shellacked to a board.

Johnny and his wife live in one of the box cars at the museum (they’ve converted it into an apartment) and welcome visitors year-round. Call first to make sure that Johnny’s not busy, and pay no attention to the angry signs out by the road. They’re directed at Johnny’s communist county planning and zoning commission, not museum buffs (and potential finger purchasers) like you.

Sections: Attraction News
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New Home, Old Fans For Assassination Bullet And Human Hairball

September 25, 2011

There’s only one collection in the world that showcases both a human hairball and the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln — and it’s also an official American National Historic Landmark.

Welcome back, National Museum of Health and Medicine! The museum was closed for five months as its artifacts and things-in-jars were gingerly packed and moved from Washington, DC, to its new location in a brand new building in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Now about that human hairball….

“It’s one of our most frequently requested specimens,” said Tim Clarke, the museum’s deputy director of communications. “One of the first families that I showed around the museum last week asked for two things: the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, and the hairball. And I was glad to show it to them.”

The hairball, medically known as a trichobezoar, was pulled from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl who had eaten her own hair for six years. According to Tim, its prominent place in the new museum is an example of how the staff will try to incorporate long-time visitor favorites — such as the hairball, death bullet, and the amputated leg bone of general Dan Sickles — with the museum’s mission of medical education.

Museum employees don’t necessarily assign a higher value to exhibits that prompt the most “Eeeews!” but visitor reactions are important and the staff does want to know what the public wants to see.

With a collection of 25 million objects, the museum can’t possibly display every anatomical nightmare in its cornucopia of curiosities, but a quick catalog of its opening exhibits includes a leg ballooned with elephantitis; a megacolon; the jet black lungs of a coal miner; dishes filled with cringe-inducing kidney and gallstones; and the skeleton of a Spanish-American War vet so arthritic that it fused into a sitting position for the last 15 years of his life (he died at 43).

The museum, said Tim, constantly circulates exhibits, so although a favorite horror from the past might not be on display now, it could be again in the future. Don’t be shy about letting the staff know your preferences, and don’t feel nervous about visiting just because you want to look at things that are gross and cool.

“We’re glad that any visitor seeks us out,” said Tim. “For whatever reason, we’re glad that they do.”

Sections: Attraction News
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Vampire, Mermaid, Monkey’s Paw Are New Pals For Museum Ghosts

September 15, 2011

“I believe ghosts can be anywhere, I just don’t believe they’re everywhere,” says Vince Wilson, curator of the National Paranormal History Museum in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

That conviction is one of the reasons why Vince lives where he does — inside the National Paranormal History Museum. Known locally as “The Haunted Cottage,” it’s also home to at least four ghosts. According to Vince, you can’t find those kinds of amenities just anywhere.

Vince is a certified scientific researcher of the paranormal. The ghosts in the museum, he says, are entities that took him 11 years of dogged investigation to distinguish, although it helped that he could work from home.

Vince understands that tales of all-nighters where nothing much happened don’t make a very satisfying walk-through museum experience, particularly to a Ghost Hunters generation expecting instant gratification. Rather than salt his museum with orb pictures (which he doesn’t believe in) or Ghostbusters dummies wearing Proton Packs, he’s turned the second floor of the museum into an “exhibit of the supernatural” — a showcase for the most visually punchy examples of unexplained phenomena that he can find.

There’s a cast of a Bigfoot footprint and a full size silhouette of the Mothman, a monkey’s paw and an elongated Peruvian skull, the skeleton of a two-headed frog and a genuine Jivaroan shrunken head. A Fiji Mermaid shares space with a space alien locked in a box labeled “Area 51.” There’s a “Hand of Glory” — the severed hand of a murderer, coated in wax — with its fingertips blackened from evil rituals, and a full size vampire skeleton with fanged incisors and a stake through its ribcage to prevent revivification.

Vince may not believe in all of these things, but he believes that showing them is a good way to introduce the broad field of neo-science to the general public. He hopes that the exhibits will inspire some of his visitors to come back for a “haunted overnight” at the museum, or participate in a full-blown ghost tour investigation on the weekends. “We’ll teach them things they don’t learn on the ghost hunting shows,” he said, then invited everyone to the museum’s annual Halloween séance where they’ll try to contact Houdini.

Sections: Attraction News
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Welcome Back, Tacoma’s Unwelcome Goddess

September 14, 2011

Gods are notoriously fickle, but so are their human constituencies.

Tacoma, Washington, for example, once had a “Goddess of Commerce” statue. She held a globe in one hand, an oar in the other. She supposedly resembled the wife of the architect who designed the building on which she stood.

In 1950 the building was torn down and the Goddess was melted, reportedly for a bottle of whiskey.

In 2008, Tacoma booster Griselda “Babe” Lehrer decided that the city needed a new, updated Goddess of Commerce. She quickly raised money, partnered with the Tacoma Historical Society, and hired a local sculptor. She confidently predicted that the statue would be standing by the end of the year.

It wasn’t. A lot of people didn’t like the new Goddess, or that Babe and the sculptor, Marilyn Mahoney, had just gone ahead and built it and now expected the city to take it. The Goddess was rejected by the Tacoma City Council in 2008 — which then erected another statue on the same spot — by the Tacoma Arts Commission in 2009, and by the Tacoma Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2010.

Everyone had an opinion about the Goddess. Much of it was unflattering. The Arts Commission wrote that the statue lacked artistic or aesthetic merit, and judged that it was worth $20,000 less than it cost to make. The Goddess’s head — no longer an architect’s wife — was seen by some as Native American and potentially offensive to the local Puyallup tribe. The miniature Tacoma that she held in her hand was compared to a TV dinner tray. Her dress was described as the kind worn by polygamist cult wives. People made fun of her ship-loading-crane earrings, or were creeped out by the tiny salmon streaming down her back.

But the Goddess also had fans, and Babe Lehrer fought on. Finally, another local booster, Seong Shin, came forward and offered the Goddess a landing spot. She was unveiled on August 31, 2011, on a privately-owned, formerly ragged corner lot leading into Tacoma’s theater district. The street corner now looks much nicer, even for those who may not love the seven-foot-tall bronze Goddess standing atop a four-foot concrete base.

In the end, the base was the Goddess-backers’ only artistic compromise. She was originally supposed to stand atop a miniature Mt. Rainier.

Sections: Attraction News, Statues
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