Scene on the Road

There are a lot of good reasons to hit the road: Spring Break, death or divorce, a midlife crisis. I have friends who are trying to visit the birthplaces of all 43 US presidents, and as I've already bragged here, I've been to all fifty states. But one of THE most popular excuses for a road trip is built around America’s favorite pastime - taking in home games at professional baseball stadiums.

As if I need an excuse, I figure the All Star break is a great time for a minor league journey, so I head south on US Highway 40 toward Ripken Stadiumin Aberdeen, Maryland, home of the Baltimore Orioles single-A league IronBirds. The stadium is right off I-95, but parallel to the freeway is a section of US 40, a classic pre-interstate cross-country route, one of the original 1920s highways. After leaving Atlantic City, it used to go all the way to San Francisco, before I-80 was built and absorbed it in Utah. More on the road later, now it's "Play Ball," as the game starts with a parade of little leaguers on the field.

Cal Ripken, Jr. and his family (with some help from their hometown of Aberdeen) built the fan-friendly 6,000 seat stadium modeled after Baltimore's Camden Yards, where Cal played his entire career. Just like at most Minor League games now, the staff interacts with the crowd, and brings fans onto the field for contests.

Tonight, between innings as the IronBird's are beating the Phillies Williamsport Crosscutters 15-10, there are tee shirt tosses, "hillbilly horseshoes" (toilet seat tossing) and dance and sports trivia contests. There is a Picnic Plaza and a Kid Zone near left field has batting cages, pitching speed booths, and an inflatable moon-walk. Most home games become sold out, but standing room tickets go for $5.

Besides the IronBirds There are a whole bunch of professional league teams in our tri-state region. Here are links to their websites: Atlantic City Surf; Camden River Sharks; Harrisburg Senators; Lakewood BlueClaws; Lancaster Barnstormers; Newark Bears; New Jersey Jackals; Reading Phillies; Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees; Sussex Skyhawks; Trenton Thunder ; Williamsport CrossCutters; Wilmington Blue Rocks; and the York Revolution.

I'm driving "south" in Maryland, on US 40 - the east-west route between New Jersey and Utah. I probably confused some readers in my previous post. The classic transcontinental highway just runs parallel to north-south I-95 for a while before it heads west near Baltimore. US 40 itself doesn't go north-south.

But US 40 is one of those old cross country road trip routes - not unlike the much more famous Route 66, where Martin Milner and George Maharis' characters drove a shiny new Corvette convertible in the 1960's television show.

During its heyday, US 40 went from Atlantic City to San Francisco, and was one of the highways created in the 1920's when the U.S. government took over the numbering of federal roads. So in many sections of the country, US 40 replaced classic road names like "Lincoln Highway," "Victory Road" and "National Road." These couple dozen miles of US 40 in Maryland are NOT on the old Lincoln Highway, which is a road well documented by fellow Inquirer photographer Eric Mencher and his wife Kass Mencher. They have been shooting the Pennsylvania portion - US 30 - for years now and last year together retraced the entire route to the West Coast.

Not wanting to step on their toes, I am avoiding a Lincoln Highway road trip this summer, but this still gives me chance to drive on a piece of that particular American road history.

The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 diverted or killed off many of the rest of the cross country US highways.

As the stretch of I-95 in Delaware is the most-expensive toll road on the East Coast (and with an upcoming increase, is set to become one of the costliest in the nation) many drivers use US 40 to bypass the booths, where if they look hard, they can see remnants of the Golden Age of Automobiling.

On my drive south on US highway 40 in Maryland, I'm in my car, waiting out a sudden afternoon downpour. I'm sitting in front of the Concord Point Lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay in Havre de Grace. On a road trip I never "just" sit in my car, so I'm experimenting with different shutter speeds, apertures and planes of focus trying to combine these various elements to make an interesting picture of this oldest continuously operated lighthouse in the state. I always feel liberated when shooting a well known landmark, and enjoy this kind of photography the most, as I believe I have more latitude for creativity.

From their brochure: "...on the banks of the historic Susquehanna Flats, the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum houses one of the finest collections of working and decorative Chesapeake Bay decoys ever assembled."

Earlier, while stopped at a traffic light in Perryville, I begin to wonder (told you I never just sit) just what it is about a road trip that makes it so appealing. I figure it's not unlike other hobbies - collecting coins or stamps or refrigerator magnets. Visiting all fifty states or the presidential birthplaces is just another way of collecting - encounters, experiences, anecdotes - and snapshots. Speaking of sitting, America's two favorite pastimes, according to the Harris Poll, are reading (35%) and watching TV (21%).

Between raindrops, Nancy Schmidbauer of Joppa is leading a line of women walking along HdG's homes, downtown restaurants and dozen antique shops. They are the wives of the National Association of S Gaugers, having their convention at the Travel Plaza on I-95. As the local, with the host Baltimore American Flyer Model Railroad Club, she organized the tour. "This gives us a couple hours away from the guys. We don't want to spend all day looking at trains." The group collects 3/16" model trains.

I meet David Richman and his son Ray on Aberdeen Proving Ground's "Mile of Tanks." From Silver Spring, they're also on a road trip, with their nine year-old grandson/nephew. I recall every tank I've ever seen parked outside all the VFW halls and all the American Legion posts around the country, and figure there are probably that many - and more - here at the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum. They have hundreds of tanks and big-guns-on-wheels spread over 25 acres.

But all l think about is John Candy and Joe Flaherty doing the "Farm Film Report" on SCTV, where they explode things behind the barn. "That blowed up good. It blowed up real good." Or David Letterman dropping watermelons from his roof.

It's not all laughs though. I don't see anything about IED's in Iraq, but there is a Desert Storm memorial outside the museum, next to the 30 foot tall bomb, and inside are collections of all kinds of guns and displays of ammunition, chemical weapons and even non-explosive booby traps from Vietnam. I also learn that shrapnel was a person long before it was an ingredient of car bombs. British artillery officer Henry Shrapnel designed the new type of artillery shell two hundred years ago. They used it against Napoleon where the Duke of Wellington wrote of its effectiveness in the Battle of Waterloo.

I'm heading north back to Philadelphia, still on US 40 in Maryland, where my day-trip has turned into two because of the IronBirds night game in Aberdeen. I'm thinking of the golden age of motels and diners before the Interstates as I pass a small "postcards" sign.

Figuring they might have cards from the days when US 40 went from Atlantic City all the way to San Francisco, I meet Mary Martin, who took over "The World's Largest Postcard Store" - her mother's mail-order business in Perryville a few years ago.
"I didn't just put that there for fun," she tells me as we start looking for vintage US 40 cards. "It's not like all those 'World's Best Crabcake,' we really are." She has MILLIONS of cards. We talk about the "collecting gene." Her mom, dad, and she has it, but not her siblings. Her son does - "I could tell when he was three" - but not her daughters (that's seven year-old Anna running above). Her dad started a coin-stamp mail order business when he was still a teen, eventually opening a store in Baltimore. Her mom became interested in postcards while tagging along to stamp shows. "This is truly her hobby grown amok," Mary says. She thinks children should do more collecting - of anything - and encourages them through her work on the board of the local Boys & Girls Clubs.

We find three vintage motel cards from places Mary thinks might still be along my route and I head out trying to find one.

It's not easy among McDonald's, Home Depots and RiteAids, but right next to a construction site in Elkton - for still one more drugstore - I see an old motel sign, or rather an M***L sign. I would have never seen it from the road, but here it is. Behind a drive-thru coffee hut, totally hidden from the highway behind HUGE overgrown trees is the 1950's Ciampoli Motel from one Mary's postcards! Dennis Prince (that's him in the photo above) is sitting on a lawn chair and knocks on a door to wake fellow residents. Dennis Mitchell (below, on the left) and Jack Patrick step into the daylight and check out the post card - sent by someone from the motel to a relative in St. Louis in 1954. Mitchell says he first stayed here, "when I got back from 'Nam," and entertains me and the others with his stories from "before the Democrats took over in Baltimore," when "dignitaries and aristocrats" stayed here all the time. I'm introduced to Nubbs, one of the community cats, "honest to God, it was born without a tail," and I leave declining an offer for dinner on their grill, but promising to mail them all copies of the card.