3,000 FEET ABOVE OUR FAIR CITY, June 9 --- It's 4:17 p.m., and from my window seat on the starboard side of the airplane, I can see Downtown, the Mansfield Bridge, the McKees Point Marina and my neighborhood in North Bittyburg. I suppose I could pull a D.B. Cooper and bail out right now using the air stairs, but I don't have a parachute and I think the landing would be a rough one. Also, since I haven't robbed any banks, they probably won't make any movies about me (though I might end up in Jay Leno's monologue).
So I guess I'll just stay seated. I doubt I could find the air stairs anyway, since I'm pretty well lubricated. The stewardesses --- excuse me, cabin crew --- have been plying us with free beer and wine since we left Dulles, about 20 minutes late. A connecting flight from the West Coast was late, which meant that a bunch of people who were supposed to be on our flight were delayed. Then, we had a rowdy passenger who got in an argument with the pilot and who was questioned by security. And in talking with the pilot later, passengers found out that we had to detour more than 100 miles around a bad storm system in western Maryland.
To make it up to us? Free hooch!
The Florida trip was interesting, if tiring. I used up a week's vacation time to do research for the book. All but one of the interviews was a success in terms of the information gathered, and a couple of the interviewees turned out to be very pleasant surprises. (In fairness, I haven't yet had a meeting with anyone in my G.C. Murphy research that hasn't been pleasant.)
There are plenty of places that I wouldn't mind living --- Boston (Massachusetts, not Elizabeth Township) and Toronto (Ontario, not Ohio) are high on the list --- but after spending five days in Florida, I've decided that's not one of them. As the week progressed, I found myself getting eager to get back to Our Fair City as the trip progressed. (Weird, eh?)
It didn't help that I kept getting reminded of the Mon Valley as I traveled. The Tampa airport has a Westinghouse-designed people mover system that is a dead ringer for the old "Skybus" at South Park. (The shuttles were recently replaced, as it turns out, with cars made at Bombardier's plant in West Mifflin.) I saw a restaurant on U.S. 1 near Palm Beach called the "Holiday House." In Sarasota, there's a street called "Toledo Blade Boulevard," which made me think of the Post-Gazette (which is owned by the Toledo Blade. And in the library in Leesburg, Fla., where I stopped to check my email, I listened as a man stopped at the reference desk to get a zip code for Carson Street on the South Side. He was from Pittsburgh; the reference clerk was from the Youngstown area.
I am grudgingly willing to admit that I can understand why someone might want to live in Florida, especially if they were tired of rainy summers and gray winters in Pennsylvania. But not me. I don't like heat, and I don't like crowds, and I don't like suburban sprawl, and Florida has all three of those in abundance. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be crazy to live there, but it probably helps.
...
To Do This Weekend: Meanwhile, back in the present, Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band play the South Park Amphitheatre at 8 tonight. The show is free, but donations and proceeds from concessions benefit the Innocence Institute at Point Park University. ... Mon-Yough Riverfront Entertainment Council and the Caribbean and Latin American Student Association of the University of Pittsburgh host the 21st annual Caribbean Food and Music Festival from 6 to 10 p.m. Saturday at Riverfront Park, Water Street between Fifth and Ninth avenues. There will be live salsa and Latin music and food. Admission is free. (In case of rain, events will be moved to McKeesport High School, Eden Park Boulevard.) Call (412) 678-1727 or visit MYREC's web page.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., June 8 --- There's an old joke about a bank robber who hands a note to the teller that says, "Give me all your money. This is a f--- up."
"You mean this is a stick-up," the teller says.
"No, this is a f--- up," the robber says. "I left my gun at home."
Today was a f--- up. Luckily, I didn't have a gun.
I spent the night in Ft. Myers and had to be in Delray Beach --- on the east coast of Florida --- by 10:30 a.m. My official motor-club-issued road map assured me that I could get from Ft. Myers to Palm Beach in about an hour and 12 minutes. I left Ft. Myers at 8:30 a.m., confident I'd be in Delray Beach with time to spare.
What the motor club map failed to mention was that it would take me the better part of an hour just to get out of Ft. Myers, owing mainly to a big wreck on I-75 that snarled traffic and a "short cut" that turned out to be a "long cut." I had to call my 10:30 appointment and tell him I'd be late. Then I called my 3 p.m. appointment and left a message on his answering machine, asking him if I could reschedule for 5 p.m.
A short digression here: I'm the last living American adult without a cellular phone, owing to my legendary cheapness (see the Florida Diary for June 5). That means all of my calls had to be made from pay phones. Since the deregulation of the phone industry, both the quantity and quality of pay phones has tanked. Of you can find a pay phone, in my experience, there's a better than even chance that the phone will be out of order.
When I pulled into Delray Beach, I stopped at a Hess station and tried calling my 3 p.m. again. The phone took the change and connected the call, but the person on the other end couldn't hear me. That left the two of us shouting "Hello!" at one another until he finally hung up.
I went to my noon, nee 10:30 interview, then found another pay phone. It wouldn't take change. The next pay phone I tried wouldn't dial numbers outside of its own area code. Disgusted, and looking forward to a hot shower before my next appointment, I checked into a motel and called the 3 p.m. again. "I have a 5:30 dinner engagement," he said. "We can't meet at 5. Can you get up here right now?"
It was 3:30, and he was in Hobe Sound, about 20 miles away. "I'll be there as soon as I can," I said, hanging up the phone. As I opened the door, I scanned the "fire escape" information card. After several safety tips --- fill your bathtub with water, don't use the elevators --- I saw the last line. "Above all, keep fighting. Don't quit."
What a comforting thought.
I headed for Hobe, but bad Florida driving bit me, hard, again. I got about two miles on I-95 north before running into a solid wall of traffic; three cars and a tractor-trailer had collided and were smeared across all three lanes. It took about a half-hour before the Florida Highway Patrol got traffic moving on the shoulder.
In the process, I damned near saw another tractor-trailer cream a compact car; the rig's driver leaned out the window and screamed obscenities at the woman driving the compact for a solid minute. Florida drivers put the "Sunshine" in the "Sunshine State."
By the way, if you think the Pennsylvania Turnpike is a mess, then you need to try the Florida Turnpike --- which bizarrely parallels I-95 for a lengthy stretch. The Florida Turnpike --- or excuse me, as the state bills it, "Florida's Turnpike" --- is a narrow, bumpy, and expensive mess. For that matter, I put about a thousand miles on the Monte Carlo in three days, and I can confidently state that many of Florida's interstates and state highways are just as bad as, if not worse than, Pennsylvania's.
One road that didn't seem to be in bad shape, at least for the stretch that I drove, is the legendary U.S. Route 1. I can remember reading a long National Geographic magazine story years ago that followed U.S. 1 from Key West to Maine, and as I left my truncated 3:30 p.m. appointment, I realized that I was on U.S. 1.
I decided to follow it down the coast as far as West Palm, where my hotel was. I rolled down the windows of the Monte Carlo, turned up the stereo, and moved over into the slow lane, driving along and smelling the salt air. In Juno Beach, I stopped at a little park and walked to the beach, where some people were parasailing. The weather since I arrived in Florida has been unremittingly lousy --- gray, humid, hot, drizzly --- but with the strong wind blowing off of the ocean and the colorful parasails in the sky, I found the gray clouds that had been following me around all day were finally lifting.
A little further south, reality intruded again. For several blocks on either side, the big wide boulevard was lined with boarded-up stores, ramshackle motels with peeling paint, and businesses that were damaged by long ago storms and never reopened.
Still, as well-known Floridian Dave Barry often says, I am not making this up: I spotted a rainbow in the sky at Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. And cruising south along U.S. 1 in the twilight, looking at the palm trees and the Atlantic Ocean and the pastel-colored houses, Florida actually began to look kind of pretty. I could finally understand why someone might want to live here.
Take the advice of the motel warning placard: Keep fighting. Don't quit.
FT. MYERS, Fla., June 7 --- They say good fences make good neighbors. Based on what I'm seeing, Florida's Gulf Coast must have a lot of great neighbors. I've never seen so much stockade fencing in my life. It seems like every other neighborhood is a gated community, and some of them are quite large --- one I visited this morning had 3,500 residents.
Yet not all of these gated communities are upscale. I've seen several that were primarily composed of mobile homes ... excuse me, manufactured houses. Some of the manufactured houses, in fact, are very nice, and almost indistinguishable from stick-built houses. They ought to be: Some of them are selling for $150,000.
You heard that right: Glorified trailers are running about 150 grand. Actual permanent homes are going for considerably more than $150,000, and I'm talking about little houses --- 1950s-style ranches that would fit in perfectly in Port Vue, but on tiny postage-stamp lots instead of the quarter-acres in Westwood Hills. Even the very expensive upscale houses down here are on tiny lots, in fact, and because so many of them are built on sandy soil, the lawns are
decidedly scruffy. It's kind of odd to see these $400,000 faux rancheros on little ugly weedy lawns. It's as if the builder of one of those Hempfield Township McMansions accidentally erected them in Braddock.
(Well, OK, so you don't see so many palm trees in Braddock. Also, for $400,000 you could own Braddock, and have change left over to buy Chalfant. But I digress.)
By the way, paying $400,000 for a house in the Ft. Myers-Naples corridor doesn't get you anywhere near a shoreline. But for $700,000, you can get a house on one of the local lakes, according to the local Re/Max office. It's one of what they're calling "patio" houses --- basically a flat concrete slab with a two-bedroom stucco ranch house and a two-car garage. In most cases, you're actually sharing a wall with the neighbor's house, so for three-quarters of a million dollars, you're buying half of a duplex that would set you back maybe $70,000 in Versailles Borough.
That's for a lakefront house. If you want oceanfront property, you're looking at upwards of $1 million.
Back to the gated communities. Why so many? I'm not sure, because I don't know who they're trying to keep out. People from the other gated communities? Are there rivalries? Maybe 80-year-old retired insurance salesmen from Villa Real get together and rumble against the 80-year-old retired schoolteachers from Oceanbreeze Estates. Then they drag race their Larks and Hoverrounds up and down the Tamiami Trail.
My great-aunt has lived in the Ft. Myers area for 10 years, and I stopped in to visit with her. At lunch, talk turned to the new construction that literally is going on at every intersection. I told her I was amazed to see that a new housing development was being erected on what looked like to my ignorant eyes nothing but sand.
According to her, though, there was a minor scandal in Ft. Myers a few years ago when the purchasers of a bunch of $250,000 houses found their retirement homes suddenly shifting and cracking. It turns out that the foundations which were supposed to have been shored up were, in fact, built on nothing but sand. The houses had to be torn down and rebuilt, she says.
"What do people do for work around here?" I asked.
"Mostly, they're retired," she said. The deed covenant in her community requires all residents to be at least 55. If a resident dies, she says, and their spouse remarries, they have to remarry someone at least 35, or move from the plan. Love is blind, but attorneys who write deeds are not, I guess.
In any event, she said, the biggest sector of the local labor market is in service industries --- restaurant workers, retail clerks, housekeepers.
"How can they afford to buy a house for $150,000?" I asked.
"They can't," she said. "They live in old shacks."
Indeed, after we parted I took a ride around Ft. Myers, neighboring Bonita Springs, and Naples. You don't have to look very far beyond the glitzy new shops and strip malls along U.S. 41 to find tarpaper shacks and ancient (or at least ancient-looking) aluminum mobile homes along unpaved roads.
Who's working the jobs? My aunt has an answer for that, too (admittedly unverified, though she's well-read and politically active). In the last 10 years, the number of illegal immigrants in Florida has doubled, she says. That goes a long way toward explaining why so many of the housing developments have fences around them, and guards at the gates.
I'm not going anywhere near Miami, where the clashes between Anglos and Cubans are the stuff that presidential campaigns are made of. Nevertheless, I suspect there's ethnic tension to spare in central Florida. Driving on U.S. 27 south of Orlando, I saw several businesses --- motels, garages, restaurants --- with signs that said "Owned and Operated By Americans."
There's nothing like appealing to someone's racism as a way to distinguish yourself from your competitors, I suppose. Of course, the Mon-Yough area's record of ethnic tolerance doesn't exactly make it a shining beacon of hope for humanity, either, and the reason that Western Pennsylvania doesn't have any problem with immigrants is mainly because nobody is emigrating to it.
But that's an issue for another time.
LAKELAND, Fla., Monday, June 6 --- I had only been on the ground in Florida for about two hours before someone gave me a two-fisted middle-finger salute, rode the bumper of my rented Monte Carlo for 30 seconds with his high-beam headlights on, and then blew past me.
I'm used to people taking a dislike to me, but usually they don't express it so vividly for at least a day or so.
As he passed, I noticed he had a Tampa Bay Buccaneers vanity plate, so I guess he can be forgiven, considering his obvious history of mental illness.
At the time I spotted the Florida State Birds in my rear-view mirror, I was doing about 75 miles per hour in the slow lane. The speed limit was 70.
Anyway, I've been driving for something like 15 years, and I've logged something like 150,000 miles behind the wheel, but I've never, ever seen anything like Florida drivers. I'd estimate that maybe 10 percent are fully qualified to operate a motor-vehicle and are in complete command of their faculties. Of the rest, I'd say something like 25 percent are road-raging maniacs in sports cars and imported SUVs, 20 percent are punk kids and rednecks in clapped-out piece-of-krep trucks, and the remainder are nonagenarians heading for the early bird specials at Denny's at 40 miles per hour in the passing lane with their turn blinker on.
The next time I complain about Pennsylvania drivers, someone, please, slap me. I have never seen anything like this. People passing on the shoulders and medians, taking right-hand exit ramps from the far-left lane, backing up on an Interstate. I hadn't been driving for more than 20 minutes before I saw my first near-serious accident, and it didn't take long before I came across the real thing on I-75 south of Bradenton. Three vehicles were spun out and mangled along the side of the road. About a mile down the road, there was another serious crash.
I had dinner Sunday night with an ex-Pittsburgher friend and his wife, and was telling them about my experience on Florida freeways. They had some advice for me.
"If you're the first car at a red light, do not try to make a 'Pittsburgh left' when the light changes," she said. "You will get killed. Also, when the light turns green, don't pull out. Look both ways first. Nobody down here stops at red lights."
I laughed, but on the way back to the motel, I started watching at red lights. She's right. And it's not like people just get caught going through yellow lights that turn red; they don't stop even for "hard" reds. Sometimes, they pause at a red light and drive through anyway.
Driving like a bunch of maniacs is bad enough, but having four lanes of traffic in each direction, with on- and off-ramps every half-mile or so adding a fifth lane, and boosting the speed limit to 70, only adds to the potential for disaster. At any given moment, I feel like I'm in an episode of "CHiPs," at the moment right before the Pinto collides with the VW Bus and a Honda motorcycle goes spinning, in slow motion, off into an embankment.
Also, everybody tailgates. Everybody, everybody, everybody tailgates. I'm not exactly Captain Safety, but I do try to leave at least two Mississippis between my car and the car in front of me --- you know, you start counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" when that car passes a point, and then stop counting when your car passes the same point. In Florida, that doesn't work, because one car will immediately squeeze into that gap, while another one will change from the far left lane to the far right lane using the remaining space in front of your car.
It doesn't help that Florida has no mandatory state safety inspection. The Pennsylvania state inspection process can be a pain in the keister, but at least it usually keeps the rolling disaster scenes confined to farms, and ensures that most of the cars around you have brakes. Here, about one in 10 cars is a junkyard refugee, and they're passing you on the right, doing 85 miles with a temporary "doughnut" spare and with a garbage bag taped to the passenger side door to cover up the missing window, flapping in the wind.
And another thing: Despite the snow and salt in a typical Mon Valley winter, it's not uncommon to see '70s and '80s cars around. I don't see many old cars in Florida --- perhaps they all get destroyed in spectacular collisions before they get more than 10 years old.
Instead, the junkpiles I see are late-model cars with dents on every visible body panel, rear-bumpers dragging the pavement because of broken springs and shocks, and loud, loud, loud mufflers.
Speaking of junkpiles, that brings me to the 2005 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that I've rented. After 500 miles behind the wheel, I can safely assert that the current Monte Carlo is a perfectly despicable little car. If this is typical of the kind of krep that General Motors is forcing onto its customers, then they deserve to have their debts lowered to junk bond status, because they are, in fact, building junk.
Both outside and inside, the design is utterly graceless. I could forgive the cruddy styling if it was at least fun to drive, but this Monte Carlo wanders all over the road. The brakes have little or no pedal travel --- you don't come to a stop a little at a time; the brakes are either on or off. The arm rests are in the wrong place, it's impossible to comfortably hold the steering wheel at the time-honored 10 and 2 positions, and there aren't enough positions on the tilt-wheel to find a relaxed angle. Slam the doors, and they rattle hollowly. Try to slam the trunk, however, and you'll find you have to force it down. I'm not saying my sleek, gray Mercury is the pinnacle of the automotive builder's art, because it isn't, but this Chevy makes my six-year-old Grand Marquis look like a Rolls-Royce.
Maybe I'm letting this miserable, unloveable Chevy color my entire perception of Florida motoring, but I doubt it.
By the way, for those of you who read a lot into these kinds of symbols, I've been taking careful note of the decorations on the cars I see. If there's one common theme, it's "W'04" stickers, yellow magnetic ribbons, and Jesus fishes.
But perhaps the classiest vehicle I've seen so far in Florida was a brand-new black Ford F-150 pickup truck with a pair of pink plastic globes hanging from the trailer hitch. It took me a minute to realize they were supposed to represent testicles.
No, he didn't also have a Jesus fish. Good thing, too, because it would have opened an irony black hole that would have sucked in everything around it.
TAMPA, Fla., June 5 --- I am not what you call an experienced traveler, especially when it comes to flying, and that's mainly because I throw nickels around like manhole covers. I rather enjoy traveling, actually, but airplane tickets cost money, and so do motel rooms. That means that when I go somewhere, I drive (or even better, get someone else to drive), and when I stay, it's strictly Motel 6 and Econo Lodge for me.
But I need to do some interviews for the G.C. Murphy book, and some people whom I very much want to talk to are in Florida. That's a little bit long to drive, even for my sleek, gray Mercury. And since the trip is being (generously) paid for by a grant, I don't feel right dinging the grantees for the price of an Amtrak roomette. That leaves me flying the money-losing skies.
You may recall that the Tube City Almanac, about two years ago, told U.S. Airways to go pound sand and leave the Pittsburgh International Airport. Surely, I said, other airlines would fill the empty gates. Well, they have, and one of the newcomers is something called Independence Air. I decided to take a little bit of my own advice (which serves me right, many people would say) and book my flight with them. They used to be a charter carrier called Atlantic Coast Airways, and they used to also fly as a feeder service for the big trunk lines. When the airlines decided to launch their own low-cost regional carriers, Atlantic Coast decided to strike out on its own, too.
I've got to interview seven people in three days, spread out from the Gulf Coast of Florida (Naples, Bradenton) to the Atlantic Coast (Delray Beach and Hobe Sound). I've also got to stop in two small towns near Lake Okeechobee. So, I've decided to fly into Tampa, rent a car, drive from interview to interview, and wind up my trip three days later in Palm Beach, where I'll fly back to Pittsburgh.
The first leg of the trip on Independence Air takes me from Pittsburgh to Dulles, where Independence has its hub. And here's where my lack of airline experience bites me in the rear end, hard. I made sure that all of my junk fit into two carry-on bags, and that the bags were under the maximum carry-on size. I made sure nothing sharp or even vaguely threatening was packed. I packed my hand-held amateur radio, but I disconnected the battery (to make sure it wouldn't transmit while in flight, which is a major FCC and FAA no-no) and put my amateur license in the bag with it. And as I approached the X-ray machine at Greater Pitt (sorry, I can't break that habit), I unzipped both bags before putting them onto the belt. Then I put my sportcoat into a bin and put it on the belt.
"This bag has a laptop in it," I told one of the TSA screeners. They nodded.
I walked through the metal director just as the woman running the fluoroscope began yelling at me. "SIR! DOES THIS BAG HAVE A LAPTOP IN IT?" she shouted.
"Yes, that's what I told ..."
"SECURITY! I need a pat-down on this man!" she said.
And thus I found myself in the little glass cube, taking off my belt, taking off my shoes, emptying my wallet. At least they didn't come at me with the gloves and the K-Y Jelly, and to the credit of the guy doing the pat-down, he was very apologetic. But would it have killed the first screener to say, "Sir, you need to take the laptop out of the bag?" Or for Nurse Ratched to just say, "Hey, dummy, take this laptop out of this bag and go through again?" No, we had to go through the whole rigamarole. Maybe they have a quota to meet.
As I was going through the pat-down, Nurse Ratched came over to yell at me: "Where's your boarding pass? You need to have your boarding pass!"
"It's in my sportcoat," I said. "Inside coat pocket."
"You're supposed to have it with you at all times, sir! There are signs posted, sir!"
"But you told me to take it off and put it through ... " I started to say. It didn't matter. She was gone, presumably, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, to take a bunch of 8-by-10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
Duly chastised, and deemed a threat to no one but myself, I was set free. I resolved to strip naked at the Palm Beach airport for the return flight. It might be the first time in history that they need the barf bags at the terminal and not in the planes.
Pittsburgh International, by the way, now has an attractive display in the airside terminal depicting the history of commercial aviation in Allegheny County, including many nice photos of Allegheny County Airport and old Greater Pitt. It made me more than a little upset all over again that the county demolished the old terminal rather than seriously trying to repurpose it.
It also made me nostalgic for the days when people used to dress up in good clothes and get into a luxurious TWA Super Constellation or United "Mainliner" DC-6. They strolled into the terminal --- no security checks necessary --- and across the tarmac, and then stepped into the airplane, where lovely stewardesses brought them pillows, hot coffee and tea, and magazines to read.
Granted, airliners in the 1940s also had the unfortunate tendency to plow into the sides of mountains, and tickets were considerably more expensive (relatively speaking) than they are today, but you take the good with the bad.
In any event, Independence Air turned out to be a pleasant experience. The flight to Dulles was in a brand new regional jet, and Dulles to Tampa was in a lovely new Airbus 317 with leather seats. The airplane safety lecture on the smaller jet was delivered (via tape, of course) by Allison Janney from "The West Wing." I suppose that's because we were flying to Washington, D.C. If we had been flying to Chicago, maybe we would have gotten Noah Wyle, and if it had been L.A., I don't know, Erik Estrada. They even gave us hot towels. If I have one complaint, it was that those leather seats were finished in a shade of electric blue never before seen in nature. Gelett Burgess never saw a purple cow, and I'll hazard that there are no bright blue ones, either.
On the flight down, I read Joel Achenbach's column in the Washington Post, and was relieved (after all, misery loves company) to find that he shared my feelings: "The security checkpoint is a bottleneck in a transportation system that is supposed to be as fluid as possible. Most people at airports are business travelers, and business travel is, at least in theory, all about efficiency. In the ideal world, you have the conversion of a solid (the businessperson) into something that can be transported through the arteries of the American marketplace. The model for this is canned cat food, which, according to my friend Mit, takes advantage of the great innovation known as pumpable meat. The industry figured out how to render meat into a fluid and pump it into the cans, which are then sealed and cooked. That's what you're supposed to be when you travel in America: Pumpable, squirtable human meat, transferred from one container to another.'"
The worst part is that I don't feel particularly any safer from terrorist attacks, and I some how doubt that if (when?) we're attacked again, that terrorists are going to skyjack airplanes. For all I know, they'll use golf carts.
Achenbach calls us "sheep" for putting up with this stuff at the airports of a supposedly free country. To which I say only, "Ba-a-a-a-h."
At Tampa, I picked up a copy of the Tribune. The big story on the "Region" page was about Weeki Wachee Springs. Apparently, the Southwest Florida Water Management District is trying to shut down the tourist attraction in an attempt to force the resort's owners to comply with new regulations. Weeki Wachee, for those of you who don't know, is a place where young women in mermaid outfits swim around for the amusement of yokels.
You might think that Weeki Wachee belongs on a planet of its own, and you'd be close enough; it turns out that it has its own municipal government, and a total population of 9 full-time residents.
And you thought Western Pennsylvania had some small towns. At least in our tiny little in-bred municipalities, the people keep their clothes on. (Although, like the Weeki Wachee mermaids, some of the locals do have webbed feet.)
Then I went downstairs to the Avis desk to pick up my car. I'd asked for a Chevrolet Monte Carlo --- I didn't want to be too ostentatious, but I also have to spend several hundred miles behind the wheel, so I didn't want some tiny little torture chamber. "We upgrade you for free to Buick Park Avenue, OK?" said the clerk.
"Well, not really," I said, "I asked for a Monte Carlo." Cripes, I thought, isn't it bad enough that I have a Mercury Grand Marquis at home? If I get a Buick Park Avenue in Florida, I might as well get the white belt and shoes to match, too. At least with a Monte Carlo, I'd get to act out my Dale Earnhardt Jr. fantasies. (Appropriate in Florida, no?)
"Si," he said. "Let me see if one is available." There was, he happily informed me. It turned out to be in arrest-me-red.
"Well, how am I going to be able to speed in a bright red car?" I asked him. He blanched.
"Sir, please, you no speed in this car ... ?"
"I'm just teasing," I interrupted, and he smiled, a little weakly, before handing over the keys.
The Monte had the two features I most wanted in Florida --- a radio and air-conditioning --- so I sat inside, fired up the ignition, and turned both on. My past experience with rental cars led me to believe that the radio would be tuned, loudly, to either a hip-hop station or a classic rock station, and I wasn't disappointed --- it was the latter.
Luckily, in preparation for spending 10 or 20 hours in the car in Florida, I had brought 10 CDs of old-time radio shows in MP3 format, along with the CD player and a cassette tape adapter. In fact, I had been patting myself on the back for the past several days for being so smart.
Until I noticed that the Monte didn't have a cassette player. It had a CD player.
Which wouldn't play MP3s.
Pride goeth, etc.
I was scheduled to meet some friends in Venice for dinner that night. On the way there, I punched through the radio dial. It seemed that I had my choice of classic rock, the drone of NPR, Spanish salsa music and about five different fundamentalist Christian stations.
Finally, I pulled off of the Interstate and stopped at a Walgreen's to buy one of those little plug-in dinguses that broadcasts your CD or MP3 player over your FM radio. Sure enough, they had one (made in China, natch).
Lucky me, they also had a sale on batteries. In fact, they were featuring a whole string of items because of a very festive upcoming occasion: "Stock up now for Hurricane Season!" said the signs.
It seems the state of Florida suspends sales taxes on emergency items for the first two weeks of June. And just as some places have President's Day sales, and other places have Back to School sales --- well they have hurricane sales in Florida. You got a problem with that?
As it would later turn out, Walgreen's and the other stores --- Advance Auto Parts, for instance, was advertising portable generators and flashlights --- had excellent timing. Florida's first major tropical storm of the year hit a few days later. You've got to know the territory.
I want to begin by thanking Alert Reader Officer Jim for taking over the Almanac for a week while I was out of town. I'm sure a book deal is in the works for him, or possibly a regular panel slot on "Off Q." (He'll sit between Ruth Ann Dailey and Fred Honsberger.)
For the record, I was traveling in Florida to do some research, but I didn't really want that posted in the Almanac until I got back, for fear that it was like putting a big sign in the front yard that said, "Burglars Welcome." That presumes, of course, that some prospective burglar is reading the Almanac, which would require readership to be up into the double digits, I suppose.
Anyway, I planned to have a complete diary of my trip in the Almanac, beginning today, but due to a computer error (specificially, "Operator Error jt3y"), I forgot to post the first installment this morning. It will appear later tonight. Mea culpa. (I know, you want the new guy back. He didn't forget.)
In the meantime, I wanted to get something as a thank you present for Officer Jim that would be appropriate to his line of work. Thus, I think you'll agree that the gift pictured at right makes a lot of sense.
Before I forget: Julie Mickens does some wonderful work in City Paper. I have very much enjoyed her analyses recently of Allegheny County's patchwork transit system, particularly when she dissected various proposals of Picksberg's Democratic mayoral candidates. Her cover story last week dealt with Braddock, and the impact that the Mon-Fayette Expressway is likely to have on that borough.
The expressway, as currently planned, would wipe out much of Braddock to make it easier for people to speed from Downtown Picksberg and Monroeville. Mickens asked a variety of Braddock residents and local officials what some alternative development strategies might be.
One could argue that the Mon-Fayette Expressway has already had a negative impact on Braddock. I've been told that many of the abandoned properties below Braddock Avenue have been held as "investments" for the last 20 years by absentee landlords who are hoping to cash in when the highway comes through.
The bigger crime of the Mon-Fayette Expressway, in my opinion, will be perpetrated on Turtle Creek, which is going to turn into one big noise and dirt trap for the highway. No one seems to be saying "boo" about that. Some people would say that although Braddock has bottomed out already, Turtle Creek is still a relatively healthy community. If you've been down to Union Township (the Finleyville-Elrama area) and seen the giant stilts that the Joe Montana Bridges sit on top of, then you've got an idea what Turtle Creek can look forward to. Would you like to live under those? I sure wouldn't.
Some how, I can't imagine the Turnpike Commission trying to blast a six-lane expressway through Sewickley and Fox Chapel --- or even through Edgewood --- which leaves me with the sneaky suspicion that people in Braddock and Turtle Creek just don't have the money or the political clout to matter.
Otherwise, wouldn't the elected officials who represent the Mon-Yough area --- members of county council, state legislators, etc. --- be raising holy hell about this? For now, their silence speaks volumes.
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