Travel
Day Three: More on Oz
We got the hell out of Dodge around noon yesterday (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I’ll tell you about our time there, but first I want to fill in some details about our visit to Liberal and our drive north on Wednesday…
After the Larrabees dropped us off at our motel and we said goodbye to our new friends, we drove over to a laundromat so Jim could dry the clothes he washed the night before. He had attempted to do this in the microwave in his room, but it hadn’t worked out too well for him. Once his clothes were dry, we drove over to the newly restored Rock Island Line Depot for lunch. Then it was off to the Coronado Museum, which is in a house that was built by Henry Larrabee’s son, Lee, in 1918. The big draw at the museum complex is Dorothy’s House, which wasn’t in the Wizard of Oz movie, but the folks in Liberal have furnished it to resemble a typical farmhouse from that era. The pantry featured a an old pressure cooker that looked like a cartoon bomb.
After Dorothy’s House, our tour guide, Gary, led us to a building that houses five thousand square feet of animated Oz magic. According to him, the exhibit was donated to the museum by an elderly couple who had enjoyed recreating scenes from Frank Baum’s stories in diorama. He also said that normally the museum has high school girls who dress up like Dorothy to lead the tour, but he was filling in since they were in school at the time (we did get to see one of these girls a little later). After the tour, we went back to the main museum. Gary, who is a local historian and former eighth grade teacher, didn’t know a lot about Henry either, so Jim shared some of the information he’s gathered.
We headed north to Dodge City in the afternoon and stopped at a couple roadside attractions along the way. The best one was a hideout used by the Dalton Gang. The guy who ran the place was not only knowledgeable about the Daltons, but western history in general.
OK, it looks like I’m not going to have time to write about Dodge City this morning, but I will tonight. We have to cover a lot of ground today and should land somewhere in Wyoming tonight.
Day Three: The Larrabee Boys and The Wizard of Oz
After eating steak for both lunch and dinner yesterday, I opted for the fruit plate this morning despite the waitress’s warning that most of it came from a can. I was somewhat surprised that I did not regret this decision. Once we finished breakfast, we drove around town a little before Jim called Joe Larrabee to arrange a place to meet. Joe said he’d be over in a few minutes with his brother Bill. We all had coffee at the motel restaurant and looked over some photos and documents Jim brought with us. They didn’t have much new information to share, but they offered to take us around to see some sites.
Jim didn’t look too sure about things when I eagerly accepted Joe Larrabee’s invitation to go see his snakes before we did anything else. As a surveyor, Jim spends a lot of time trying NOT to see (or, more accurately, feel) rattlers when he’s working in the field. He’s a good sport, though, and we took off with the Brothers Larrabee to peer inside Joe’s giant box of snakes. Joe used to put on shows featuring the snakes, but stopped doing them recently because it was too expensive. He also told me that he took up hunting snakes as an alternative to golf.
After the rattlers, we headed out to Arkalon, which is where Henry Larrabee first settled before the family moved into Liberal. There isn’t much in Arkalon now but an abandoned school house and a cemetery. I did get to see a praire dog, though (Joe is always on the lookout for them because rattlesnakes also live in their prairie dog towns). After that, we drove down to the Cimarron River, which wasn’t much wider than a big creek. There we saw a beaver dam and the bridge known as “Mighty Sampson.” Bill said the bridge was built in “quickie sand” and that in order to support the bridge, the engineers had to bury pylons 90 feet deep (that was his rough estimate).
While driving around with Bill, Jim also learned that what he saw yesterday was probably a female grouse and not a roadrunner. And to my dismay, Bill confirmed that Jim probably did see a boar’s head in the road. Hog farming is apparently big here.
We ended our tour with the Larrabees at the cemetery in Liberal where their great-grandfather, Henry, is buried. It might be difficult to see in this tiny photo, but the headstone was very unusual, and Jim and I wondered if the pattern etched into the front might possibly contain another clue.
I don’t have time to write about our trip to the museum, but I will leave you with this tantalizing photo of the Wizard of Oz exhibit. My favorite part of this tour was our guide’s retelling of Frank Baum’s story. It was folksy, succinct, and featured lines like “well, I guess that old witch was pretty sore about those shoes....” It was, in a word, OZSOME!
Day Two: New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas
After driving through four states, we finally arrived in Liberal, Kansas, around nine tonight. We are staying at what can only be described as the most spectacular motel ever built. We saw the Liberal Inn listed in Jim’s AAA guidebook and although there was nothing exceptional about the write-up, we probably passed a dozen motels (including Supers 6 through 9) before we found our latest temporary home on East Pancake Avenue. I think we were drawn here by some inexplicable force (this was confirmed for me when we sat down for dinner and Wichita Lineman started playing on the bar jukebox). I haven’t asked yet, but I think the doors to our rooms used to open to the outside before the owners built a roof over everything. Now the floor-to-ceiling window by the door looks out on a dimly lit hallway. The effect is something like supermax prison meets Japanese capsule hotel. I love it here.
Other great things happened today, too, besides the Liberal Inn. We took a side trip to Santa Fe after we left Albuquerque this morning. We became temporarily lost when Jim’s pickup couldn’t make up its mind whether we had a half tank of gas or just enough to carry us a few miles. Once we finally located a fuel station, we made our way into town over the Santa Fe Trail and the Old Pecos Trail. We had breakfast (tacos!) in one of the oldest buildings in town and then visited a couple of churches. In Texas we saw some pronged horn antelope, and Jim saw what he thought was a roadrunner and a boar’s head in the middle of the road (I’m just telling you what he said). We passed through a town called Hooker with a sign that read “Welcome to Hooker, Home of the Horny Toads.” Oh, and we crossed the Pecos River at least twice.
We are planning to meet with one of Henry Larrabee’s descendants tomorrow as well as visit the cemetery. There is also a museum in town that is located in what used to be the home of one of Larrabee’s sons. And if there’s time, I’m hoping to check out Dorothy’s House and maybe we’ll make it to Dodge City. I have a hunch Jim can get his photo taken with Miss Kitty there.
Day One: California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico
Pat took this remarkably terrible photo with my cellphone this morning after we met up with Jim in Victorville (it was really bright outside). Once the pickup was loaded, Jim and I headed off in search of Henry Larrabee. Despite an unplanned detour through Nevada (we were attempting to film in the truck and missed our turnoff), we managed to make it all the way to Albuquerque tonight. The day was mostly uneventful, although it was a perfect day for southwest scenery, and Jim kept me entertained with plenty of stories (one of the most interesting was about the Zebra Killings, which took place in San Francisco in the early 1970s). I also tried unsuccessfully to convince my traveling companion to have his photo taken with the “girl in the flatbed Ford” in Winslow, Arizona, after we heard an ad on the radio, but he wouldn’t even slow down to take a look at her. It’s late. I’m tired. More tomorrow....
Traveling East to See the West
Next week I’m heading to Kansas with a man I met on the Internet. Don’t worry if you’re reading this, Grandma. It’s all legit. We are hot on the trail of Henry P. Larrabee, a man who played a rather notorious role in Humboldt County history, but about whom very little is known. I met my soon-to-be traveling companion, Jim, several years ago on a genealogy discussion board as I was researching a documentary I wanted to make about Blocksburg, which we think was originally called “Laribee” before it became Powellville and then finally Blocksburg. Jim was much further along in his research and had even managed to locate some of Larrabee’s descendants, who--somewhat surprisingly--painted quite a different picture of Larrabee after he returned from the West. It turns out the man was a lot more complex than the facts we originally had allowed us to see. Well, for various reasons my movie never happened, but I became fast friends with Jim and his family, and he has continued to correspond with various members of the Larrabee clan. Over the past couple months, a series of events has made Jim decide it’s time to go meet some of these people in Texas, Kansas, and Montana. And most exciting of all, he’s asked me to come along and record the interviews. Maybe I’ll get to make that movie after all....
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