Scene on the Road

Flags were invented to be noticed, and photographers have always made use of their symbolism. Like other representations of objects and concepts, flags serve as a shorthand for us, a part of our visual vocabulary.
We include them in our pictures not just because of what they say, but for aesthetic reasons as well, because they look good and usually add to the composition of our photographs (I'm more partial to hats and umbrellas).

This nation's flag flying fervor reaches a pitch today for the Independence Day holiday, when flags will be seen from barbecues to ball games to parades across America. So to both salute our country's birthday - and to celebrate this photographic element - I asked readers to submit their favorite flag photos. The one above is from Inquirer photographer David M Warren, who has over the years collected hundreds of images of flags. This one was attached to a car antenna. Enjoy.

Larry Browne is a volunteer firefighter in Doylestown and the company photographer, originally from Long Island. He photographed a memorial service there for firefighter Capt. Thomas Moody, who was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11. There were 26 ladder trucks forming 13 arches with flags. Browne asked a few of the firefighters about the tribute, and they told him that they planned on doing the same thing at the services for all of the members of the FDNY who lived in Suffolk County.

Matthew E. Jones took this photo at the 2007 Phillies home opener. The soldiers are from the 56th Stryker Brigade of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

Mary B. Harris came up with a flag photo of herself and daughter Mary Louise made thirty one years ago. Harris was a big fan of the celebration for the American Bicentennial in 1976. At that time, she recalled, there wasn't a huge groundswell towards an organized celebration, so she took a longer view. She made plans for a personal celebration for herself, her family, and friends. Among other things, she designed and hand sewed a new flag for this special birthday. The seamstress is now seventy-seven years old! In the interests of family harmony, she didn't want to disclose Mary Lou's age...

Harry M. Roth said his wife thought this would be an interesting flag candidate.

Theodore Lang made this photo of the flag near the Cape May lighthouse. The white streak is a jet airplane, not a scratch.

The Church and cemetery is on Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, photographed by Jim McWilliams, a member of the Delaware County Camera Club.

David M Warren captured a reflection in the fluid drippings in the parking lot of a Cherry Hill Post Office.

I have been seeing the big hand-painted roadside billboards with the Birds of Paradise hex signs on some of my previous road trips - there were even brochures at a Delaware truck stop. So I had to detour slightly to visit while driving west on Pennsylvania Route 73 in Berks County this week. The Kutztown Folk Festival, which runs through July 8 at the Kutztown Fairgrounds, celebrates German - "Pennsylvania Dutch" - and other early American folk art - and of course funnel cakes.

I figure it's a big deal when bright yellow temporary "no parking" signs line the residential streets for blocks before the grounds. But it's the hand-lettered $3 parking signs - or could it be the lady with the Amish brimmed straw hat on the motorized scooter holding them and pointing right at me - that gets me to pull over.

Kathy Gilmore (in the hat) and Fern Kulp are "working" the parking lot right up against the festival's perimeter fence. It's actually the side yard of Mabel Kunkel's house. "We thought with the rain we'd be slow today, so we sent her away to play bingo," Gilmore says of "Mom." Technically, that would be mother-in-law. Or ex-mother-in-law. She married one of Kunkel's sons in 1969. "That's when I came into the parking picture," she says. They are now divorced, "but I still call her Mom." Kulp has been his current girlfriend for fourteen years now.

Both women work the lot together during the festival's two week run, and get along famously, along with "Mom" and the rest of f her kids, grandkids and great grandchildren.
Mother Mabel bought the house in 1950, a year before the festival began, and has been parking cars in her yard ever since, her daughters-in-law relate. "It started with friends asking if they could park here." That first year they charged 50 cents per car. They had three "quick kids" who were soon selling lemonade (5 cents a cup) alongside mom and dad. A son earned enough one summer to pay for college --at least for one semester. "College was cheaper then too," Gilmore points out, telling me her own grandson (the fourth generation of car parkers) was selling bottled water on Sunday - consumer tastes have changed as well - for 50 cents.

The festival's $12 admission includes parking, but it is in huge remote lots. Their customers, many regulars, "want to be able to find their car at the end," Gilmore says. "And to able to support the local people," adds Kulp.

As I come back from the festival to retrieve my car, Mabel Kunkel, back from bingo, comes out on the porch to say hi, and repeats many of the parking stories I've already heard. Except hers come out in a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent. "I'm Dutch-a-fied," she laughs. "This is what they come to hear. I'm the real thing."

I'll be posting more later from inside the festival, and along Route 73. When the festival is over, you can go to the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at nearby Kutztown University. They have a museum, and a year-round program dedicated to the preservation of "Pennsylvania Dutch" history, folkore, and traditions.

I'm still on my slight detour off Pennsylvania Route 73 in Berks County (the same 73 that crosses the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge and becomes New Jersey Route 73) to visit the Kutztown Folk Festival (through July 8 at the Kutztown fairgrounds). As any fair-goer knows, the real purpose of a festival is good eating. And at a Pennsylvania Dutch festival, you can count on the chicken pot pie, corn fritters, funnel cakes, shoo-fly pie, strawberry shortcake, and apple dumplings. But my guilty pleasure would be ice cream (remember the exception to the "Don't eat anything that's served out a window" Road Trip Rule?). So I end up in front of the "4th Day Homemade Ice Cream" counter, where a wooden display stand is filled with cups of sundaes looking just-scooped.

Wondering if they're the plastic replica food you see at sushi bars, noodle shops or even trendier izakayas, I ask seventeen year-old Kristy Angstadt (although her name tag says "Roberta Lee") who directs me to owner Laurie Davis (name tag "Sassy') of Valdosta, Georgia. "Oh, it's real alright," she tells me. "Real mashed potatoes."

At first Davis used Crisco, but while the shortening lasted longer than a scoop of real ice cream in the summer heat, she hit on the old food photographer/food stylist's trick. She mixes up a bowl of instant mashed every morning, and dribbles each sample scoop with REAL carmel, hot fudge, strawberries and peaches.

But where did the name come from I ask. "Well, Christ rose after three days. The fourth day..." He ate ice cream! I interrupt. "No," Davis continued, "the fourth day is the rest of our lives to serve him. We plant the seeds."

So she and husband Alan visit fairs and festivals in the northeast, on a sort of "Ice Cream Ministry." They hire a crew of local young ladies at each stop to pedal the bicycle-powered ice cream maker and scoop the vanilla (one flavor only) into cups or waffle cones.

More people and photos from my slight detour off Pennsylvania Route 73 in Berks County to visit the Kutztown Folk Festival.
All the stickers plastered on the suitcase and guitar cases, right next to the Hoedown Stage caught my eye. Singer songwriter Alicia Keister and guitarist Jason Shaffer of Harrisburg were lost, looking for the Children's Theater where they would perform later, and the tent of Butch Imhoff's Acoustic Roadshow. Keister has a new CD out and plays coffee-shops and smaller venues, "because we're mostly acoustic." Imhoff is also bringing his roadshow to Musikfest in Bethlehem next month, where Keister will be among the more than 300 performers from across the country and around the globe, on 13 different indoor and outdoor stages (nine of the them free).

Chip Buck moved in for a closeup of his nephew visiting from New Jersey, when the goat moved in even closer. Now that the festival is over, you can go to the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at nearby Kutztown University. They have a museum, and a year-round program dedicated to the preservation of "Pennsylvania Dutch" history, folklore, and traditions. Also Pennsylvania's official travel and tourism site has a "Fairs and Festivals" search function. Look for it under the "Arts and Entertainment" pull down menu. I'll be back to Route 73 on my next post.

I am deeply touched by a cartoony bear as I stand near a cemetery facing Route 73 in Boyertown, in the rain during this week of Independence Day, watching water drip from the saluting figure's face.

On the border of Berks County, the highway becomes Philadelphia Avenue as I drive into Boyertown. It's here where I notice one of downtown's many artfully decorated "Bear Fever" fiberglass bears - the kind of public-art display that began with a 1998 fiberglass cow exhibit in Switzerland and in this country with Chicago's "Cows on Parade" in 1999.

Over the years there have been giant frogs in Toledo, race horses in Lexington, baseball bats in Cincinnati, and guitars in Nashville. Around here, I've seen the recent zoo animals in Chestnut Hill and Moorestown's Nippers.

So I admit seeing the bears didn't get me to pull over. Until the Fairview Cemetery on the edge of town. There I see a bear in military camo, standing upright in an erect salute. I have seen and photographed many memorial ceremonies and monuments, but this one got to me.

The bear's name-tag and dog tags say Zimmerman, but the plaque reads "...May this 'Military Bear' honor all Boyertown veterans, although separated by generations, shared a common undeniable goal..."

Army Pfc. Travis C. Zimmerman is a 19 year-old 2005 Boyertown High School graduate who was killed April 22, 2006 by an improvised explosive device while conducting combat reconnaissance operations in Baghdad. The quote next to his senior yearbook photo said he planned to join the Army after graduation.

The Reading Eagle reported that when sifting through Travis' belongings, his father Lloyd Zimmerman discovered that his son had saved the front page of a newspaper from the day after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "That must be when he resolved to make a stand," he told Eagle reporter Jason Brudereck at the funeral. Zimmerman's senior classmates raised the money for his bear last year, honoring all men and women from the Boyertown area who died in service to their country. It was completed in time for the town's 5th anniversary commemoration of 9-11 last September and installed this past Memorial Day.

Here's another of my "Rules of the Road Trip." Actually this one is more of a photographic road trip "Reality:" Pictures often present themselves when the driver/photographer is in the wrong place at the right time. Besides great light, great photography is all about timing. Sometimes it's being able to react to the instant. At other times it's having the patience to wait.

On a road trip, you don't often have the luxury of time. So you make the best picture you can in your situation (see previous post: Greenheads - Making Lemons Look Like Lemonade). Heading north on Route 73 between Schwenksville and Gilbertsville, a huge red fireball suddenly appears on the horizon. I watch it for miles as it slips behind trees and the two lane road dips in and out of the hills. Around each bend I lean forward in anticipation of seeing something - anything - worth silhouetting in the foreground.

Finally, even though I'm driving west, opposing the earth's rotation, I'm not moving at quite the same speed, so the sun starts to fade for good on this day. Nothing photographic materializes, so in a desperate move to salvage a photo - I pull over in front of a field of corn.

That's a lot like many of my daily newspaper assignments. Besides "careful, my face is gonna break your camera," the thing I hear most from photo subjects is: "you shoulda been here twenty minutes ago...." Or even worse, when shooting a photo for the next day's newspaper: "You should be here tomorrow!"

This brings me to another call for your photos. Reader Jim McWilliams emailed me some of his photos after I completed my third road trip down Route 9 in Delaware. He commented, "I love that ride any time of the year. I discovered it about 6 years ago as an alternative to Rte 13," and sent me photos he's shot of the wildlife - and the cooling tower at Hope Creek - in different weather and light conditions over the years. That's HIS photo at left.

I'd like to see - and share - some of your pictures made repeatedly over time in the same place. Maybe you've visited the same state park, or Jersey Shore spot to photograph in varying conditions over the years. Send them as jpeg attachments in an email, with caption information (date, location, circumstances) to me at: RoadTrip@phillynews.com. I'll post a selection later on.

For inspiration, check out the website of Jim Brandenburg (click on "Chased by the Light" under Gallery heading). To get "back to the soul of his work," the National Geographic photographer gave himself the challenge of taking only one photograph each day between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. He just made ninety single photos in ninety days around his home in the boreal forest of northern Minnesota.