The first Pizza Hut is in Wichita.
Thanksgiving Day. We woke to the distinct, slightly melancholic stillness of a holiday morning somewhere in the middle of America. Even the International House of Pancakes was closed. We sped west into Kansas on an empty interstate, and heavy rain gave way to blinding sun over the plains.
From the passenger seat, C. entertained me with tantalizing facts. The world’s largest Amoco sign was back in St. Louis. The first Pizza Hut is in Wichita. A bone from St. John the Baptist’s finger sits in a museum in Kansas City.
The flatness gets to you—the eye darts around for any point of interest or frame of reference. A lone tree becomes exciting. A sign for the National Agro-Defense Facility fires the imagination. As night fell, the fields of wind turbines turned sinister. Hundreds of red lights blinked on the horizon, pulsing to the drumbeat that filled the car, and I felt like I was in a music video that I wanted to last forever.
After twelve hours on the road, we crashed out in a hotel by the Denver airport. 764 miles to Vegas.
In the introductory lecture to my study of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis (1966), the Dean spoke of how the architecture of a place reflected a society’s values.
There was slide after slide of views of European cities with the cathedral rising above everything else.
Then suddenly came the slide of that Amoco sign.
Ha, thanks for sharing (and for reading!)—now I’m definitely visiting that sign on my way back through St. Louis.