As children, we often see the world literally and believe what our parents tell us the same way. Leaving my home in Princeton, Indiana, travelling south toward Evansville along State Highway 41 in the late 1950’s and through the 1960’s a cornucopia of strange sights unfurled along both sides of the asphalt. Rows and rows of stalks spread out like an endless sea, the depth of which grew from shallow buds to giant waves of green and then a wilted brown between Easter and Halloween. From the middle of this sea, an island of concrete block buildings surrounded a giant silo painted with the letters “Princeton Farms.” When I asked my father what grew there his answer was always the same, popcorn. But, no matter how hard I tried I was never able to envision the tasty salted and buttered white kernels my mother fed me by the bowlfuls at home popping out of those stalks as we watched Gunsmoke and The Twilight Zone and Lawrence Welk on our new black and white Motorola TV.
A few miles further as the Desoto approached the tiny village of Fort Branch a giant plaster hog rested in the front lawn of a sturdy brick home. The closer we drove to the bright white monster, the more acrid the stench that filled the air around it became. A cross between decayed earth and manure, the methane gas produce by the hog farm was a common odor in the rural areas of Southern Indiana, but beyond my sphere of knowledge at the age of ten. Whenever we passed by, I held my nose and sputtered. “What is that awful stink?” Dad never wavered in his reply. “That’s the smell of money, son.” I spent a lot of time sniffing quarters and dimes, even a few wrinkled dollar bills. The smell of ink and metal—yes—but never hog shit graced my olfactory senses.
Over the years many strange things came and went, notably a Barbeque Restaurant that featured lunchtime strippers, a tortilla factory, an oval dirt track for NASCAR wannabe’s, a concrete block building called Lamey’s Grove that housed hundreds of drunken teenagers once a week, a herd of buffalo, a race horse training farm, and a family diner with a mechanical orchestra. Of all these sights, however, none terrified me more than a bizarre ceramic business that covered a patch of land with the most hideous lawn ornaments imaginable. Driving past the place as a small child prepared me for a bad acid trip I took in my early twenties.
These eyesores along scenic country highways were not unusual in rural Americana. It was almost as if by proximity to natural beauty, the glazed nightmares were expected to blossom as well. A rainbow of painted colors adorned the statues and birdbaths. To add to the grotesqueness of the sight of three wise men, I might have found a red baby Jesus or a green Santa Claus. Birds, fish, squirrels, gargoyles, wolves, Greek columns, and Civil War soldiers stood at attention, while mermaids and best of all pink Flamingoes lined up in rows liked cenotaphs to mark the graves of unknown departed Phoenicopterus fowl. And, it might have well as been a graveyard because when I drove by thirty years later most of those same ceramic items still rested in perpetuity regardless of what lay beneath them.
Jim McGarrah, Author 