A Day in Amarillo

Last night we met the Route 66 group, 12 of us in all. Folks are from all over, VA, WA, CA, TX and Indiana. Lane, who put the tour together, brought along his 15 yr. old grandson, Matthew, a really nice kid. Most of us did our own thing on Saturday and joined up again Sat night to go to dinner.

I took a drive out to the long ago closed air force base where we used to live. What do ya know, I managed to find the house (note pic). Driving through base housing I remembered houses of high school buddies. Most of the places were in ill repair with unkept lawns. One nice thing, the trees were huge. No more golf course, it was left to go to weeds with piled up junk next to what might have been the club house. Most all of the buildings on the base were gone. Just rows of trees and overgrown sidewalks to suggest people once walked there. I remember how I could see the big tails of the B-52s towering over everything else on the base. . . all gone. The pool still had the white wooden fence around it but the white had long ago turned to black. I felt I was looking out on a town that had been blown away by the bombs the big planes carried. Very sad for me.

From there I took a ride through town on Polk Street, a favorite place for teenagers to cruise on Sat. night just to see who was out and about. I remember those nights well. There was the Paramount Theater where I hid my face through most of Psycho in 1960. I never did recover from that. Parts of Polk are still cobbled but the whole area was for the most part deserted. On a lovely Sat morning no one was cruising Polk but me.

Driving down Amarillo Blvd. I could see the buildings along old route 66. Many of them were recognizable and many had new Mexican and Asian names. Still not the best part of town, just like in the 60s. I passed Toad Hall off Western ST where Stanley Marsh lives on his ranch. His famous Cadillac Ranch has been moved and we'll swing by there on our way out of Amarillo tomorrow. I drive out Western and remember more times . . . specifically, one time when Clay was in Viet Nam and the kids and I were visiting Mom and Dad. I had some kind of infection and was really sick with a high fever. Mom took me to the Doc and on the way home she stopped at the grocery store to fill my prescription. It was in July and hot and I was burning up. I remember thinking that a butter pecan ice cream cone would really be good. And what do ya know, mom walks out, gets in the car and hands me a butter pecan ice cream cone. She said, "Here, I thought you could use this."

Tonight we go to dinner, of course, it's the Big Texan!