A Blog Along The Lincoln Highway

So we’re pushed across Nebraska by the wind.  Interstate all the way.

In mid-afternoon, the subject of lunch comes up.  Hmm.  Labor Day.  What will be open?  Can we find anything other than interstate interchange food?

Between the front seats, where we keep the box of CDs and an ever-changing assortment of important things, from Butko’s book to snacks to the SONY hi-def camera that we’ve been using, there’s also a small selection of books that haven’t been looked at a lot.  In there, I have an old trusty copy of Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood.  I haven’t cracked it open the whole trip, but since I don’t know much about Nebraska, why not turn to the experts in a time of uncertainty?

Unless we hear some sirens calling or we get changed into animals or our ship wrecks on some bizarre island, we should be home tonight.

There’s a weird mix of emotions at the end of a journey. The familiar pillow ahead. A homemade meal. Comfortable, homey smells. Loved ones waiting. But no more service. No more beds made for you. No more AC turned down to 65. No more ordering unexpected culinary delights. It will be good to be home. It will feel sad to not be on the road anymore.

Illinois goes quickly. In Indiana, when we’re ready to grab a quick lunch, we happen to be near the LaPorte exit, and we decide to go where we know the food is interesting and the decor delicious: B&J’s American Cafe where we had lunch on Day 2 of our journey with David Hay. We head into town in search of the place and the food.

We three musketeers go our various ways. Bob shoots with many of the producers for WQED’s nightly news magazine program called “On Q.” Then he and I start to work on a new Pittsburgh program that will be called “Invented, Engineered & Pioneered in Pittsburgh.” Jarrett gets hired as a grip on several of the Hollywood movies that come to shoot in Pittsburgh, including “The Road,” based on Cormac McCarthy’s unforgettable novel.

One fine fall day when the leaves look colorful, Bob and I get a station van and head east on the Lincoln Highway to Bedford. The sun doesn’t shine as much as we’d like, but we find a few nice autumnal shots along 30 and pieces of the original Lincoln.

We stop to see the Flight 903 memorial near Schenksville, PA. It’s barely a mile or two off Route 30. It’s simple to find, but then it’s not easy in any way. Grief and confusion and terror and bravery and tons of things left to honor the victims are somehow all there in the middle of a Pennsylvania field.

We shoot some of the murals that have been painted along the Lincoln Highway corridor in Pennsylvania, and we stop to meet the couple who run the Lincoln Court Motel. When they show us the inside of one of their cabins, I know we have to do a story there. I doubt that the insides of those cottages look much different than they did in the 1950s.

We’re back on the road. We left Pittsburgh yesterday morning about 11 am. We have a fine day. Beautiful blue skies above route 30 across the wide belly of Ohio. We eat lunch in Lisbon, Ohio, at the Steel Trolley Diner where Bob and I both have to have a Lincoln Highway burger with fries. Glenn has a Picnic burger.

We have to seek refuge late in the afternoon when a fierce storm stops us in downtown Van Wert, Ohio. We run into the beautiful county library there till the tornado warnings are dropped.

We continue on to Fort Wayne, Indiana. We find rooms northwest of town. We walk a block or so to a Thai restaurant for dinner. Then I’m too tired to blog before bed.

I get up early today. I’m writing a long preamble to our trip, explaining that this time it’s cameraman Bob Lubomski and me along with Glenn Syska as audio man and video blogger. As I’m typing, the computer starts moving slowly, and then the little multicolored pinwheel starts turning. I get dressed and the pinwheel is still spinning, so I push the start button to crash me out of the computer. When I press the button to start it up again, there’s a howling noise, a terrifying scream that seems to be coming from under my keyboard. Yow. I shut it down again. When I start it up again I just get a question mark in the middle of the screen. I think my old laptop has died here in Fort Wayne.

I’m pecking this out on my iPhone, wondering where I might get a new laptop on the road.

As we pull out of Fort Wayne, I’m considering all the ways I might get a new computer while traveling the Lincoln Highway. I talk to Mike Cuccaro at WQED’s Web office and he commiserates. I talk to our main computer guy on our editing team, Mr Matt Conrad, and he says, “Stop at an Apple store and get a new one. Get a MacBook Pro with the 17″ screen!”

Easier said than done, I say. We’re on a mostly rural highway, and I already checked, There’s no Apple store in Fort Wayne. Maybe I can call and have one shipped to me. Apple can probably do that really quickly. I call 1-800-MY APPLE and talk to Raoul for a while. If you want the machine customized, it will take 7 to 10 business days. If you just want one standard issue laptop in a box, it will take 1 to 3 business days to ship it. Huh? No immediate and overnight shipping? How medieval. I thank Raoul and think I may peck a lot of messages on my iPhone this trip.

Then I check the map, see that we swing through the outer southern and western suburbs of Chicago, and we pass relatively close to an Apple store at Orland Square Mall in Orland Park, Illinois. Bob says, Let’s go.

Somewhere in mid-Indiana, we crossed into Central Time Zone, so we’re feeling flush with time. Ha!

We go some 20 miles out of our way north up Route 45, but they’re really helpful at the store. Angela is the concierge and she’s waiting for us because I called ahead to make sure they had some MacBook Pros. She’s got me scheduled for a personal shopping visit, and I ask if someone can look at my old laptop too. I’m there to see if the old laptop is really dead, and maybe get a new computer. I’m not loving the idea of a speedy, unexpected big ticket purchase while on the road, but I want a computer that works.

A strong looking guy named James shows me the possibilities to purchase, and then a soft-spoken “genius” named Tony at the Genius Bar (that’s what Apple stores call their technical help section) starts running some tests on my old white plastic iBook. He starts with some bad news: “Even if we can find out what’s wrong here, and it looks like your hard-drive has died, we won’t have any parts for this computer because it’s so old.” Ouch. He tells me I bought it February 12, 2002. Six years and some months ago. In computer years, that’s about 90 or so, no? It’s served me well. My trusty old computer starts screaming like a banshee there on the Genius Bar. “Don’t worry,” says Tony to all the people who turn to see what the painful cries are all about. “It’s just a hard drive. You never want to hear your hard drive like that.”

I go ahead and buy the new computer: a MacBook Pro with a 17″ screen. James helps me set it up and then he sets me on my way.

Meanwhile Glenn is trying to document some of this whole shopping-while-traveling adventure, and the Mall’s security kicks him out for having a camera in the mall.

Watch his first videoblog.

Back in the van, we don’t get far before we stop for lunch at what looks like a local chain: Al’s #1 Italian Beef. We learned to love Italian beefs several years ago while making the PBS program called SANDWICHES THAT YOU WILL LIKE. We were at Mr Beef in Chicago then. Italian beefs are a Chicago staple. Al’s isn’t quite as good as Mr Beef’s, but these upscale suburban versions of the sandwich are pretty darn good. The giardineira has some zing, the beef is sliced really thin, and the whole sandwich is as wet and messy and tasty as I remember. As food writer Pat Bruno taught us, you have to lean forward a you bite into the sandwich. Ahh.

A new laptop. A good sandwich. Back on the Lincoln Highway heading west. Life is good.

After lunch, I take my first real shift as driver. Bob is a great co-pilot but his plans today get zonked by road repairs, accidents and detours of several sorts. We drive by the enchanted castle of Joliet Prison. We ride the short blocks in Plainfield, IL, where the Lincoln Highway and Route 66 overlap on the same stretch of road. HISTORIC ROADWAY ALLIANCE is what the signs say, I think.

We don’t follow the Lincoln Highway signs at one point and stay with Route 30. I remember the Historic Roadway signs being extremely well done here in Illinois, but Bob said they got us lost, and we’re starting to worry about time, as usual, so I acquiesce. We take the straight two-lane across the state, but Route 30 in most of Illinois is not the Lincoln Highway. The old routes mostly went north of US 30 on what’s now IL Rt 38 and other roads. It helps to have your copy of Brian Butko’s Greetings From the Lincoln Highway handy at all times.

We stop for gas in the tiny town of Shabbona which Bob has been singing about for the last twenty or so miles, always to the tune of “My Sharona.” The young guy in the gas station tells us it’s really pronounced SHAW-bawn-uh.

At the western end of Shabbona, a cop in the middle of the road is waving all traffic to turn left. We can’t see what’s wrong, so we go a block south, turn west, ride 3 or 4 blocks parallel to Route 30, then turn back out there. The road is empty for a half mile or so till we see flashing lights and a line of cars. There’s been a bad accident. A woman standing outside her car at the end of the line gives us some of the scoop: ambulances and life-flight helicopters have come and gone. “See the big 18-wheeler in the field over there? That was one of the vehicles.”

Bob and Glenn get out the camera and tripod and get some shots. The afternoon is gorgeous with green green fields all around us. When the traffic starts to move we can see how smashed and burnt and destroyed the other vehicle was. A car. Blackened and accordion-crunched. Bob says it’s the big reminder: stay alert.

The adventures never end.

It’s 11:00 pm. We’ve just settled in our rooms at the Burke Inn in Carroll, Iowa. We’re exhausted, drenched, and happy to be safe and sound. And alive. Thunder roars, lightning flashes frequently and rain pours down outside my motel room window. Deep rumbles from the depths of the darkest clouds. Torrents of water falling on an already totally over-saturated and flooded land.

About 8:00 this evening, we are tooling along our beloved Lincoln Highway, heading west from Scranton, Iowa, where we’d stopped briefly to get some shots of two cool old busts of Abe Lincoln at a bend in the original highway. We found the old markers by following the directions in Butko’s book, and we are glad we took time to see those simple, classy memorials.

But as we head toward Carroll, the sky is growing dark and threatening in front of us. Lightning dances along the horizon. I have made reservations for us tonight at the Park Motel in Denison, about 30 miles ahead. It’s a legendary old Lincoln Highway motel that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and I’ve made the reservations on-line, which means I’ve been exchanging emails with a woman there named Deb who obviously works nights because her replies always come after our work hours. She has three of their themed rooms waiting for us, but I realize it’s getting late. I don’t think I ever gave her my credit card to hold the rooms. I should call. Glenn helps find the phone number on his iPhone.

“Thank you for calling the Historic Park Motel. This is Deb. May I help you?” Her voice has a raspy quality.

“Hey! This is Rick Sebak. I hope you still have three rooms for me.”

“Oh, hon, I as wondering if you’d be coming. I was about to release those rooms. But we’re in the middle of a tornado right now. The sirens are going off, and I understand one has touched down about two miles south of town! Maybe you won’t make it here. Where are you?”

“We’re in Carroll,” I say. “But we haven’t had dinner yet, maybe we should stop and eat rather than drive into a tornado.”

“That might be smart,” she says. “I will keep the rooms for you unless you call back. Be gosh darn careful,” she says. I swear she said that. “Be gosh darn careful.”

We consider our options and then decide to turn around and go back into Carroll. I didn’t like the hopeless feeling we’d experienced the other evening in Van Wert, Ohio, when we were first concerned about tornado watches and warnings. As we come back into Carroll, Bob sees a neon RESTAURANT sign on the north side of the highway. CROSSROAD BISTRO the sign says. We decide to give it a try.

We’re reading the menu when a woman comes in and announces to the whole room that a tornado warning is up, and it’s due to arrive here in Carroll in about 15 minutes.

“Are we OK here?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she says, “we have a basement and we can all go down there if we have to.”

Someone else reports that quarter-inch hail is a possibility too, and people start worrying about their cars, and some start moving their vehicles under the awning next door at the old A&W drive-in restaurant. One man comes back and says, “With my luck the roof of the A&W will collapse on my car.” We laugh.

Bob brings the camera in before he moves our van. He and Glenn get their rain jackets, but it isn’t raining yet. The sky is terrifying to the South. Black. Dark, deep, black clouds.

Our waiter comes over to take our order, and we’re wondering if they’re still gonna cook stuff.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Unless we have to run downstairs.”

Then there’s noise outside and everybody turns to look. The rain is immediate and incredible. It’s flying parallel to the ground, not downward. The wind is ferocious. It’s like midnight all of a sudden, totally dark.

Someone says loudly and emphatically, “Everyone to the basement. NOW!”

I grab the camera. Glenn is in front of me. Everyone in the restaurant is running down the basement stairs. The railing is greasy. It’s a weird world. All the kitchen staff are there. The man who made the joke about the A&W falling on his car. A Hispanic woman and her son. All of us patrons. We “eaters.” Some people are crying. We’re all in the basement, and there are plenty of chairs and even an old abandoned microwave to sit on. We can hear the wind rushing by upstairs, knocking on the windows and doors. There are sirens going off. We take some pictures of course. It’s unsettling, and scary and Bob says we should all look for flashlights in case the power goes off.

No one has flashlights. The woman who made the announcement upstairs brings some candles and starts lighting them. I realize there’s the light from my cell phone if I get desperate. Then the power dips and goes out but comes back almost immediately. People start asking about what we’re doing and we all start talking about the Lincoln Highway. All the folks from Iowa consider how close they live the country’s first transcontinental highway. “My house is just a half block off 30!” Everyone says they’ll watch the show. Never miss a promotional opportunity.

Then someone ventures upstairs. It’s not so noisy. There’s a radio up there, and in a few minutes someone says it’s passed by, and we all traipse back up to the dining room. The woman in charge says, “Let’s get your order.”

“Are you still going to cook for us?” I ask.

“Of course,” she says. “We’re gonna feed you. We’ve bonded.”

We order, eat dinner and are winding down when someone comes in from outside and says the window is broken on her car. Bob says he’ll go and get our van from the A&W. Glen and I look out the window and can tell the back passenger window is gone. Our window is broken too! It’s still pouring down rain. Everything changes. We decide we’re never going to get to Denison. The restaurant woman offers to help “The Lincoln Highway Boys” get rooms at a motel owned by a friend of hers. We accept her offer of assistance.

That’s how we got the last three rooms in Carroll tonight. Bob and Glenn have worked hard to rig up a plastic bag temporary fix. Our big suitcases were right beside that window, and it rained into the van, but all the equipment looks OK. We’ve seen where the Dodge dealer is located, across the Lincoln Highway from the Crossroads Bistro, and we figure we’ll have to get there early tomorrow.

Then we drive here to the Burke Inn.

There’s a NO VACANCY notice posted, but I pick up the outside courtesy phone and identify us as “The Lincoln Highway Boys.” The innkeeper says he’ll be right out. He helps us in a thousand different ways. (These Iowans are extraordinarily nice and helpful.) We empty the van and bring everything into the motel. We’ll figure out how to recover from our tornado in the morning. If it really was a tornado. We think it was.

At the restaurant last night, we heard someone say that 4 people had just been killed by a tornado near Omaha. After our time in the basement, my sister Nisey called my cell phone to say that she just seen on TV that 4 boy scouts had been killed by a tornado in western Iowa. That turned out to be the truth. It’s terrible and tragic and puts our delays and broken glass in perspective.

Four boys, bright and invincible (I know they were because I went to boy scout camp too), died at age 13. We’re bonded to them by the same bad storm sweeping eastward across Iowa. Their camp was only twenty-some miles west of where we were headed. Of course, we talk about them, try to imagine the terror and the agony of their parents and families. And we grieve too as strangers do when a significant trauma seems way too close and random and pointless.

When we meet in the lobby of the Burke at 8:30 am, Pitter is behind the front desk. Her real name is Pat, but she’s been “Pitter” since she was two. Tiny in stature, powerful in personality, she is giving Glenn our marching orders for the day. She has booked us an early appointment at Carroll Glass. “Here are the directions. They are expecting you. We’ll keep your bags till you get back. And you can keep one of the rooms for late check out if you’d like.” She knows all about our broken rear side-window, and she feels we’ll be back on the road by noon.

We love these helpful Iowa folks.

Carroll Glass is in the industrial corner of town in an old building but with a slick set of glass offices inside next to the shop. The attractive woman who’s the only one working this morning says immediately that they don’t have the replacement. No one in town does. She’s called all the possibilities, but she can have it waiting for us in Omaha or in Sioux City, depending on whether we intend to go south toward Omaha (the route where many of the roads are flooded and we may be delayed) or north toward Sioux City (another route where many of the roads are flooded and we may be detoured and lost before lunch.)

We opt for Omaha, and before we leave the glass company, we hear that Route 30 is open as far as Omaha, so we can continue on down the Lincoln Highway. We grab a bite of breakfast, make a quick stop at Walgreen’s (I haven’t even mentioned that Glenn’s eyes have been all red and itchy for two days now, maybe some sort of allergy, and his father, a pharmacist, has recommended a new eye juice that Glenn might want to try), we gather our belongings at the Burke, say goodbye to Pitter, and get back on the road.

My plans had been to be in Woodbine, Iowa, this morning, getting some shots of the coffee-shop-in-an-old-gas-station known as Brick Street Station in its morning glory as a great spot for coffee and a piece of pie. And we were also supposed to meet a local woman named Linda whose sister had put together a Lincoln Highway history display in another old local gas station. But our plans were discarded back in Carroll.

Then when I talk with Marshall Scichilone (who owns and runs the Brick Street Station,) I ask if we could just stop to say hello, but we won’t shoot anything. Just a quick social visit. We have to be in Omaha by 1:00 pm. He says, Of course stop by.

Woodbine is a beautiful little town with many brick streets, including a long brick-paved stretch of “Lincoln Way,” and we fell in love with it when we stopped by last August. (read Post 14) That’s when we met Marshall, a fellow Pittsburgher, but his Brick Street Station was already closed for the day.

It’s good to see him again. A local historian named Lou is there too, and she says she’ll be happy to help if we want to do something about Woodbine. We’re chatting when a local reporter (actually Nikki Davis is managing editor of the Woodbine paper) and a photographer arrive, and we all think we’ll have a slice of pie. There’s a sour-cream-raisin pie that looks so good I have to try it. Bob and Glenn try it too. We all agree it’s smooth and chewy and world-class. “It’s an Iowa specialty,” says someone. It may be the reason why everyone is so friendly in this state.

And we figure out that maybe we could stop back here for a couple of hours on Monday the 23rd on our way home. It’s worth a try. We don’t get out of there till 1:00, and it’s still an hour drive to Omaha. We’re going to be a bit late for our appointment at the glass place.

After our delicious quick stop in Woodbine, we get back on 30 and head south for the glass dealer in Omaha. The makeshift window that Bob and Glen fashioned from a black garbage bag holds up remarkably well. We check it periodically in the passenger-side rear-view mirror.

We got lost in Omaha last year, and we do again, and we eventually find our way thanks to Glenn’s quick fingers on the iPhone, trying this and that on-line mapping services.

We get lost again when we get to the giant quasi-rural, big-box industrial park (terrifying in its own way, totally twenty-first century and faceless) where the glass supplier who agreed to help us back in Carroll. When we finally find the right big building, we have to wait till they find the right big piece of glass. It’s dark “privacy glass,” and the first piece the guy brings out is way too small. Wrong model. We have a 2006 Grand Caravan. We wait. And wait.

And just about the time the guy brings out another bigger piece that looks right, a black pick-up truck pulls in and Chad and Melanie get to work. Chad is a good natured guy who works with glass. I ask if he’s a free-lance window installer. “You might say that.” Melanie is his assistant (and sweetheart too) and they operate with cool efficiency. We just stay in the same parking spot, and they do all their work right there.

It takes maybe half an hour. Glenn and I take the chance to make a goofy video blog clip.

Chad grumbles to Bob, “You know you’re making me miss ‘Monk.’” Bob commiserates because he too loves ‘Monk.”Melanie does a thorough clean up, even getting rid of most of the residue from the various tapes that we used to hold the plastic on.Chad says the window on the middle passenger door is also pockmarked with lots of little nicks and scratches. It’s the window with the stupid Q sticker that blocks the view from the backseat. We wish that had been the one to get destroyed. Chad says don’t slam the door too hard, it could break into pieces anytime. Oh great. “You might want to have somebody look at that when you get home.”I love this: when they first put the window up to make sure it’s the right one, I see a little sticker. PPG. This piece of replacement auto glass may well have been manufactured in Pittsburgh at the Creighton Plant on the Allegheny River. We did a story about the place several years ago for our show called THINGS WE’VE MADE. Pittsburgh is everywhere.