James
Dean Died Here: The Locations of America's Pop Culture Landmarks,
by Chris Epting
If you could,
would you "run the bases" at the baseball diamond
made famous in "Field of Dreams?" Would you step on
the spot where Columbus landed in the new world, or drive to
the remote section of California highway where James Dean's
Porsche Spyder 550 crashed in 1955? Actually, the challenge
isn't wanting to. It's knowing where to go. Thanks to Chris
Epting, finding the location of significant cultural events
is not a problem any longer. In James Dean Died Here: The
Locations of America's Pop Culture Landmarks, he has created
a phenomenal road trip resource that provides pithy commentary
and useful directions to hundreds of spots where Something Memorable
took place.
Epting has grouped more than
six hundred landmarks into eight chapters including Americana,
History & Tragedy, Crime, Murder and Assassination, Celebrity
Deaths, Movie, T V and Music Legends, and the World of Sports.
Because the landmarks described are listed alphabetically,
a cover-to-cover reading of the book is like taking a ride
in time machine with the time-stamp set to "random."
From 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks boarded
the bus and refused to sit in the back, you'll jump to a modern
day visit to the Peshtigo, Wisconsin, museum that profiles
the 1871 wildfire that killed 800 people. From there, it's
a quick trip back to the arrival of the pilgrims at Provincetown,
Massachusetts (NOT Plymouth Rock) in 1620.
Hollywood, CA: James Dean picked up his
new Porsche from Competition Motors shortly before beginning
his fateful drive to Salinas. The front of the shop
is covered with images and text related to his final
day. |
Reading the book, I was struck
most by Epting's vivid descriptions of the places. They evoked
a range of bittersweet and pleasant memories of the times
that produced these pop culture icons. I was also impressed
by the diligence required to find and record the exact physical
location of the events he documents. Maybe we're all better
off not knowing that in March, 1958, a B-47 airplane accidentally
dropped a nuclear bomb near Mars Bluff, South Carolina, but
I was fascinated by Epting's account of the aftermath of the
scary incident. He also hiked three miles from the closest
road to reach the site of Patsy Cline's airplane crash in
Tennessee, and he found the exact airplane hanger in Van Nuys,
California, where Humphrey Bogart said, "Here's looking
at you kid" to Ingrid Bergman during the filming of "Casablanca."
Chicago, IL: "Public Enemy Number
One" John Dillinger was shot by the FBI in front
of this movie theatre in July, 1934 |
The Lone Ranger is long gone
from network television, but thanks to James Dean Died
Here, you can still visit the spot where his horse Silver
reared up in the opening sequences on the Iverson Ranch in
Chatsworth, California. Maybe "Animal House" is
closer to your heart. Epting has identified all of the key
locations from that movie on the University of Oregon campus
in Eugene. For that matter, he also found Archie Bunker's
"All in the Family" house in Queens, New York, the
spooky hotel where Jack Nickelson terrorized his family in
"The Shining," and the subway grating where Marilyn
Monroe's white dress billowed up in that classic photo. Perhaps
even more amazing is that Epting has identified and profiled
places I always assumed were fictional, like the Eagles' "Hotel
California," and the apartment hotel Joni Mitchell was
singing about in the lyrics, "they paved paradise and
put up a parking lot."
Los Altos, CA: In 1977, Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak created the first personal computer in
Job's very ordinary suburban garage |
History is not the past, it's
a spin. Historians interpret events, transforming them as
each commentator filters the facts. With Chris Epting's book,
readers can reduce the distance between events of cultural
significance, if not by time, at least by space. Keep this
book on your dashboard, and you'll never miss a spot where
something interesting happened again.
Mark
1/04
|
