First it led us to the nearby 575 Pizzeria for a delicious lunch. Then we drove over to Jack Sisemore’s Traveland to tour his RV Museum. It was in an un-air-conditioned metal building out back, but thankfully they had big fans roaring to keep the air moving. We walked in to find an array of very old trailers in the first room, including two suspended from the ceiling!
There were many more RVs at the museum, and after touring them all we wanted to add our own pin to the visitor map, but the continental U.S. was fully filled in. Hooray for Jack Sisemore and his obsessive collecting of recreational vehicles.
They were designed and marketed as fantasies: as works of art, in fact, in their own right. They were unveiled, like public sculptures, on rotating plinths, under spotlights. Their makers in Detroit rejected the dicta of Puritan heritage behind the early Fordian idea of a black box on four wheels. The fifties car was a rocket, onto which a heavy layer of symbolism and body metaphors was packed. It had things ostentatiously both ways, as both womb and phallus. The dreamboat had the tail of a rocket and the chrome breasts of Jayne Mansfield – a design feature that the designers, in homage to a now forgotten Scandinavian sex bomb of fifties TV, called a ‘Dagmar.’ When you hit the brakes, the whole rear end lit up red, like a robot animal in heat. Ultramatic ride, Dynaflow penetration, Triumph, lust, aggression, and plenty of room for the whole family: the siren song of imperial America. Nothing like them will ever be made again. They’re the rolling baroque public sculpture of a culture that has gone forever.
Leaving Amarillo
The jam session the day before the last recording Bob Wills (under the plaid blanket in his wheelchair) would make with the surviving Texas Playboys
We now faced the long uneventful drive west to Albuquerque. As we pulled out from Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch, we recalled an old Bob Wills song: “When you leave Amarillo, turn out the lights.” If you listen to the recording, made with the surviving members of the Texas Playboys in 1973 as Bob directed from a wheelchair, you will hear the velvety crooning rent by Bob’s hollers, reduced to croaks and moans by a hard life. That was the last time Bob hollered: he had a major stroke that night and never regained consciousness. The Playboys were in tears the following day as they re-recorded San Antonio Rose, knowing they’d never play with Bob again.
That was a somber thought as we whizzed westward past towns still struggling to survive after their Route 66 main streets were bypassed by Interstate 40. Amarillo is thriving, but who will be left to turn out the lights in Cuervo or Endee or the like? We’d contemplate that more on our return trip; for now we were focused on reaching Albuquerque before dinnertime.
We celebrated our arrival in the town named after the eighth Duke of Alburquerque with dinner at Buca di Beppo before retiring at the historic Hotel Andaluz, our base of operations for the next day’s exploration of Sandia Peak and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.
I enjoy reading, technology, day hikes, art museums, and photography. My wife Wendy and I work in the Bartlesville Public Schools in northeast Oklahoma, but this blog is outside the scope of our employment.
Meador Manor 
