Hooked on Iffy Taste

Hooked on Iffy Taste, Souvenirs

IS THIS THE MOST HIDEOUS SOUVENIR EVER?

October 14, 2014 • 0 Comments

Truman Dam is in the Ozarks, barely. The upper reaches of the reservoir are in prairie country, which have created a very shallow ugly body of water. This is a scene near Clinton, Missouri. Click to enlarge.

As the old saying goes – ugly lake, ugly souvenirs. The Harry S. Truman Dam, built by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Osage River, is one of the least economically justified, most ecologically destructive of many useless federal public works projects. It created a banal, windswept, turbid reservoir.

Truman Lake is decent crappie fishing, but it destroyed the most productive spawning grounds in the world of the giant, valuable paddlefish. Now Missouri’s sports paddlefishery must depend on expensive hatchery-raised stockings. This was a tragedy, doubly so as a lawsuit by the Environmental Defense Fund and others predicted these problems. Nevertheless the town fathers of Warsaw, Clinton and Osceola railed against the lawsuit. After several years of litigation, a federal judge refused to stop or modify the dam. The project has been a mixed blessing and former supporters have expressed their disappointment.

In the history of tourist memorabilia, is there anything as god-awful as this Truman Lake souvenir? The color combination splashed on this indifferent, awkward hunk of driftwood exceeds the Fauvist assault on traditional tonality.

Souvenirs encompass a wide variety of artistic merit. On the high end are Canaletto paintings of Venice’s Grand Canal and Van Gogh landscapes of southern France. On the low end, there are displeasing artifacts that are redeemed by the nostalgic, sentimental, or vague way they recall the place visited. In that sense, the unholy Truman Lake rootwad does resonate with the unsightly reservoir it commemorates. It is, we reluctantly admit, a successful if ugly souvenir.

Forest products are put to many trivial and crass uses, but the spirit of dead trees calls out for vengeance for this souvenir of Truman Lake.

Thinking perhaps it was prejudicial to have photographed the Truman Dam root abomination on our concrete driveway, I took it inside our garage-studio and shot it on gradated seamless paper. If anything it turned out to be even more deficient of esthetic value. Then it struck me. Perhaps I was unfairly maligning the crude $5 artifact merely because it said “Truman Lake.” Outside our suburban duplex, the low autumnal sun kissed our oil-stained driveway with golden rays. So on a mottled, tobacco colored background I flipped the thing over so the offending identification could not be seen.

Might this reveal the souvenir to be an adventurous piece of outsider art by an unknown Ozarks faux Fauve? Nah.

Click for more information on Damming the Osage. The tone of this book is more objective than this bit of souvenir sarcasm. We sell the $35, all color, 304 page book for $25 postage paid.

Click on the book cover for more information on Damming the Osage.
The tone of this book is more objective than this bit of souvenir sarcasm. We sell the $35, all color, 304 page book for $25 postage paid.

Hooked on Iffy Taste, Souvenirs

THE BASKET KING: A ROADSIDE SOUVENIR ENTERPRISE FROM THE PAST

October 6, 2014 • 0 Comments

The Basket’s King’s long emporium is on the south side of highway 54, about 10 miles west of Camdenton, Missouri. This is a road traveled by many Lake of the Ozarks tourists. (click to enlarge)

Delmar D. Davis has been purveying souvenirs to Lake of the Ozarks tourists since 1947. His long, crowded gift shop features white oak baskets made locally. This is a dying craft according to Davis as labor costs make them non-competitive with imports. His store is filled with graniteware, cookbooks, wooden decoupage plaques of wolves and eagles, Frankoma pottery, and out-of-date hillbilly calendars. This combination of authentic folk baskets and tasteless novelties may seem incongruous, but we’ve encountered it before in our survey of American rusticity.

Although Davis’s current stock of locally made hickory baskets is extensive, he told us there were few makers left these days. His crafters can make more money at a job. His prices are reasonable, and don’t include a folk-craft premium though they are authentic old time type Ozark type baskets.

It is a bit disconcerting to find jokey hillbilly, made in Taiwan, novelties just across the aisle from classic pioneer crafts, and we have a high tolerance for such incongruities. It’s a central tenet of our HYPERCOMMON theory that as America’s popular culture evolved without the constraints of high culture it gleefully mixes kitsch and things with esthetic merit indiscriminately.

We bought this attractive small hickory basket for less than $20. (click to enlarge)

Originally souvenirs were artifacts made by exotic peoples brought back by explorers. In the early days of tourism most souvenirs were items made to sell, but had some resemblance to local craft traditions. Global trade opened the door to the importation of low cost trinkets made in developing countries. Purveyors of locally made souvenirs, like the Basket King, are rare these days. Art and demonstration crafts are still produced here and there in vacationland but they carry a prohibitive price for the souvenir trade, and do not always have a heritage tie-in.

Delmar D. Davis, a sailor in World War II and pioneer souvenir seller in the Lake of the Ozarks area, is an engaging personality. Notice to documentary filmmakers – the Basket King would make a great subject.

Davis’s billboards are distinctive. If you don’t catch all the writing as you speed down the highway, don’t worry. Another one will soon come in view

Of course, Davis Baskets has a “your face here” cutout painted plywood hillbilly. In fact, there are several. Lake of the Ozarks never promoted its indigenous population as much as Branson. But hillbillies weren’t completely unknown as a theme either, especially in the 1950s.

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Confessions, Hooked on Iffy Taste

RURAL RUINS JUNKIES

September 29, 2014 • 0 Comments

Book Cover – In spite of a fairly good cover design we didn’t finish the small town project. (click to enlarge)

Rural Ruins Junkies was the working title for a book on small Midwestern towns that we did a cover for, but never finished. We made half a dozen trips to western Missouri and eastern Kansas taking photographs of villages that were a faded memory of what they once had been. Visiting these declining small towns brought back fading memories of how some twenty years earlier we made a living “liberating” antiques from rural inhabitants. On this present junket we were able to accomplish some research for our book Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, but other than confirming that small towns were in decline we gained no insights.

The following few paragraphs are remembrances of these capitalistic forays of long ago.

NOTES MADE AFTER A TRIP THROUGH SOME SMALL TOWNS OF MISSOURI AND KANSAS, AUGUST 30-SEPTEMBER 2, 2009:

The summer of 2009 was cool and wet, at least in the Midwest. In a rented white Nissan Altima we leave Springfield, Missouri and head west. On the upper Neosho and Verdigris rivers we will search for places where the Osage Indians had villages after losing Missouri by treaty and before selling their Kansas lands and buying their present reservation from the Cherokees in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). There will be little indication of these sites. With the cessation of fires set by the Indians, ragged lines of trees crisscross the former prairies along fencerows and roads. Nevertheless we will photograph the landscapes and nearby waterways where books locate – often vaguely – mid-nineteenth century Osage towns.

Mural of Osage Indian camp, Oswego, Kansas. The Osage basin extends several hundred miles into eastern Kansas, and there is recognition by locals of that fact. (click to enlarge)

There had been in southeast Kansas squatters, like Laura Ingalls family, before the red men had been bought out. A few scattered little houses on the prairie, but no proper communities – only trading posts. Soon after the chiefs put their mark on paper, railroads slammed down their rails and began delivering thousands of land-hungry sodbusters. Towns sprang up along the tracks to ship agricultural products out and bring manufactured products in. Few of the earliest balloon-frame wood businesses have survived, but there is a surplus of brick and stone structures from the turn of the nineteenth century. We are not unfamiliar with such places.

Driving down brick streets lined with vacant buildings in various stages of disrepair, we become uneasy. Possibly a couple of fifth century Visigoths visiting Rome for the second time might have had this feeling. Things are not the same. Today we take photographs. Once we took old tin advertising signs and ornate quarter-sawn oak display cabinets from now boarded-up storefronts. Decades back Crystal liberated thousands of hand-pieced quilts from such Midwestern village residences and surrounding farmhouses.

Selling pictures has never been easy – and today the market is impossibly flooded. The old stuff we used to buy on our safaris we could turn in ten days, doubling our money. When we turned that plunder, we’d run out and score again. Motoring on to the next distressed little town, we would confess regrets but get no absolution. Some might say pillagers like us are incapable of guilt and undeserving of forgiveness.

In our defense, we were benevolent vandals. We paid for our booty. Still, our rapacious ways drew outrage from, of all people, an independent Hollywood movie producer, an Army artillery officer who did two tours in Vietnam, and a multi-millionaire Kansas City grain trader. Institutional capitalism is more socially sanctioned than the naked individual pursuit of profit. Such chastisements revealed unfamiliarity with country people’s awareness of what things were worth. Admittedly we exploited our advantages of having cash, current price information and mobility. But our sanctimonious critics showed ignorance and condescension believing rural people to be easy to fleece.

Auction house in Oswego, Kansas theater. There was at one time a lively business redistributing the old stuff left behind by a shrinking population. (click to enlarge)

We will not need to haggle over the price of a Marx tin toy or a double weave coverlet and be reminded that small town antique dealers were the descendants of horse traders and land speculators. There are almost no antique stores left. The few dealers that haven’t given up the ghost or gone to eBay aren’t able to stock a whole shop with vintage items. Pickers like us have picked these places clean.

Even the women we bought antique textiles from often negotiated. To our moralizing acquaintances it seemed unethical for us to buy 1930s never used Wedding Ring or Dresden Plate hand pieced, hand quilted bedcovers for $90 and then sell them on the phone to a San Francisco shop for $175 plus UPS. The widows who sold them knew the nieces who would inherit them might let them go at a garage sale for $20. Elderly rural folks are surprisingly well traveled. At Silver Dollar City or antique shows or shops they learned pretty well what retail prices were. Farmers’ wives knew wheat at a grain elevator or cattle on the hoof brought less than bread or steaks.

This isn’t to say that walking away from a little white farmhouse with a black trash bag containing three generations of heirloom quilts that would soon decorate the bed of a Long Island stockbroker or a Santa Barbara divorce lawyer wasn’t heartbreaking.

Seeing these little Kansas towns falling further into disrepair gave us pause. When we looted such villages thirty years ago they showed their age. Today their portable and marketable contents long gone and their roofs leaking we realize that time is short to record their appearance. Perhaps we can deal realistically with our unresolved and conflicted feelings about America and our place in it.

Or is our country junket just the self-medication of rural ruins junkies?

Gallery of Small Towns by Leland Payton. Click on any image to start slideshow.