COUNTERTOPS
Highway Hangouts: Biting the hand
For those of you that missed it, the History Channel aired a third installment of its Highway Hangouts series last week. Entitled "Eat and Run," this show focused on roadside eateries, including the "great American diner."
The show also included shots of yours truly as one of the several "experts" on roadside culture. The program also included Peter Genovese, Brian Butko, Jim Heimann, and a smattering of the folks that actually operate some of the roadside attractions featured as examples of the genre.
Given the show's pedigree as a commercial program on a low-budget cable network, we shouldn't expect much. Riddled with cliché, rife with incongruent supporting video, and narrated by the 84-year-old Mason Adams, who's down-home voice now sounds like a thick coat of frosting on a bucket of saccharine, the program yanked just about every nostalgic string it could grasp during its two-hour run.
OF COURSE, the producers just had to show diner waitresses speaking "diner lingo." OF COURSE we had to see people sitting in '57 Chevy's. And OF COURSE, we had to devote a quarter of the program to Route 66. I guess people drove along no other road in this country, though I faintly recall reading a few things about something called the Lincoln Highway which actually stretched coast to coast.
I did learn a few things. The show spent some quality time with a few attractions that haven't had much of their own publicity, including the Clam Box and the Java Jive. Also, seeing Harold Kullman of Kullman Industries and Jack Mulholland of the Mayfair Diner talk about their respective businesses of building and operating diners gave the diner segment most of its credibility. In fact, I wish the producers spent more time with folks such as these and less with the talking heads. After all, those in the trenches of this culture have much more interesting stories to tell, and in fact, provide all the source material anyway.
The show also lavished considerable screen time to John Margolies and Michael Stern. Margolies has authored nearly a dozen books on the subject of the American roadside, covering everything from mini-golf to travel brochures.
Michael Stern constitutes the male half of the RoadFood royal couple along with Jane, his wife. The pair write books and articles that have appeared in many major magazines and newspapers, which have established them as the nations preeminent over-the-road dining mavens. I've previously called the Sterns to task for their snide, condescending, almost nasty commentary about local food and the people that work the business. Seeing them trotted out as experts on diners frankly does a tremendous disservice to their readers and especially to the diner industry.
I give the couple credit for shining the spotlight on many deserving gems. But too often they bestow their praise in snotty, backhanded fashion delivered high from their Fairfield County perch. On the radio, the drawling whine of their voices could only find fans among those who'd rarely risk leaving their Hummer H2 to chance a mingling with the lowly plebeian regulars in such places. But if Jane and Michael says its okay, then it's time to go slumming.
At least Stern has a palatable on-screen persona. The producers of this program nearly shot themselves in the foot by allowing Margolies to get so much face time on this program. Is it just me, or did you also squirm every time the camera cut to this guy?
John Margolies is one of several authors of the past decade who has churned out book after book that I would describe as "gee whiz" displays of their personal collections of photographs and ephemera. In a sense, these books -- which also include those by Karl Michael Witzel -- do some good by calling the mainstream's attention to threatened roadside culture and enterprise.
While it's generally easy to dismiss Witzel's efforts out of hand as pandering, poorly researched, badly produced, albeit pretty picture books, Margolies has established a notable career for himself as the New York Times puts it, "America's premier chronicler of architectural kitsch." He's currently an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, which has awarded him a one-year grant of $35,000 to pursue independent projects of significant interest and to write articles based on his investigations for the APF Reporter. The Highway Hangouts series is based largely upon Margolies's body of work.
Yet Margolies may have based his career on a false pretense as well. When Witzel published the otherwise awful American Diner, he used a great deal of the work of a photographer named Pedar Ness. Ness's photos of diners and other roadside gems dated from the 1960s and 1970s, a period when only a handful of people recognized the value of this type of architecture. I met with Ness three years ago when I traveled to Los Angeles, and he claims that his early photographs provided Margolies with a kind of visual reference from which to base his own work. Ness had claimed that he sought to publish a book of his photos and happened to submit his proposal complete with original slides to an agent who also worked with Margolies.
According to Ness, the agent rejected his proposal, but his slides came back to him in complete disarray -- as if someone had pulled apart the portfolio to make copies. Some time later, Margolies had published his first book and began presenting slide shows using photos identical to Ness's, except, as Ness explained it: "He cleaned up the scene. Swept away the trash." Ness says he later attended one of Margolies's slide presentations, but when he introduced himself, Margolies wouldn't so much as look at him.
It's a sad irony that some of the most successful and notable chroniclers of this proud and honorable aspect of our history and heritage -- rich with tales of honest, hard working folk struggling to do something good for themselves, their families, and their communities -- have fashioned careers upon such thin or dubious credentials.
With that in mind, I look forward to seeing Rick Sebak's next production due out next summer. As I write, you can find Rick roaming the country visiting large buildings "that look like something else." Rick has already produced an impressive body of work for his station WQED in Pittsburgh and for PBS with programs such as the "Pennsylvania Road Show," "A Hot Dog Show," "The Ice Cream Show," and "Pittsburgh A to Z." While not exactly scholarly, the programs are honest, and at least I know that Rick really loves this stuff.
And so it goes.
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