September 12, 2022

Italy’s Amalfi coast is supposed to be lovely. So is Merida, Mexico, on the Yucatan peninsula. Just two weeks ago two of our children were visiting both. We have friends now visiting Palermo, Italy. So where are we going?

Many of us yearn to jet off to faraway places, to see Europe’s great museums, cathedrals, and castles, to cruise the Rhine to Strasbourg and the Danube to Vienna. We hope to stroll past the Coliseum in Rome and climb the Eiffel Tower and China’s Great Wall. The plaintive, beautiful tune, “You Belong to Me,” sung by multiple artists back to Jo Stafford’s sweet tones in 1952, says it all:

“See the pyramids along the Nile … watch the sun rise on a tropic isle … fly the ocean in a silver plane … see the jungle when it’s wet with rain …”  You close your eyes and listen, and think, I have to do that, I have to go. 

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The rolling hills and rich green fields of Prince Edward Island run down to rocky beaches along the island’s northern coast, which faces the rich blue Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The rural roads are nearly empty even when they pass through tidy, peaceful villages. Tall steeples of old churches break the horizon. In fall 2010 we drove around the island, stunning in its beauty. We stayed near the fictional Ann of Green Gables home. Most restaurants and hotels had shut down for winter, but we managed.

The urge to travel is almost a law of nature for retired people. Travel is one of the things our nest eggs are for. In June we drove to Wyoming, then last month to New Jersey. New Jersey?  Why not a long plane ride to some exotic place? Our last plane trip was in June to New Hampshire for my college reunion. Last fall we flew to Colorado to visit our daughter. Before that, in July, we flew to Boston, rented a car and drove, again, to New Hampshire.

In the depths of covid, no one was flying. Before last summer I recall taking a plane to Seattle to see my sister and brother-in-law in 2019. It was winter. They no longer live there.

We got to London for the Farnborough Air Show in 1988 and to Paris for the Paris Air Show a year later, both were work trips. We saw some of the sights, London Bridge, St. Paul’s, the Eiffel Tower. For our 25th anniversary we went to Rome. At the Vatican we got close to the Pope (John Paul II, two popes back). I thought he looked me in the eye.  Sandy went back to Italy with her church choir. Our kids all have been to Europe, our son and daughter-in-law to Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, our daughters to Japan, Russia, and Peru.

I have been to some unique places. In the Marine Corps I spent a year on Okinawa because the Corps sent me, no fun and games. In Naha, the capital, I visited the sad memorial at the cliffs where Okinawans leaped to their deaths during the ferocious April-June 1945 battle. I rode a bike around the rugged northern end of the island where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. On leave I went to Taiwan and rode a train from Taipei to spectacular Sun Moon Lake and to mysterious Taichung City.

In 1980 I visited Nicaragua on the first anniversary of the Marxist-Sandinista revolution, while sporadic fighting continued. In the hotel bar I ate dinner with Sandinista soldiers who laid their automatic weapons on the tables while small-arms fire echoed outside. The capital, Managua, still was in ruins after the 1972 earthquake.

On my way to Managua I visited Guatemala in the middle of the country’s tragic 30-year civil war, when the military and vigilante armies fought Marxist guerrillas in the mountains. The then-president, General Lucas Garcia, was overthrown by yet another repressive general in 1982. A year later, I spent a week in Mexico City, inhaling its red-brown smog. I walked across the Plaza de la Constitucion, the Zocalo, and rode out to the Aztec pyramids. In the hotel a maid asked me for money, I gave her pocket cash. Poverty torments, even at the Marriott.

On the plus side, in June 2010 my son Michael and I went fishing on the Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. We flew to Yellowknife by way of an overnight in Edmonton, Alberta, then in a pontoon plane to a wilderness camp. For four days we hauled in giant lake trout and northern pike from the near-freezing lake.

My siblings and our kids all have been to Ireland. Our daughter spent a year in college in Dublin, we never got there. It’s on the list. I’d like to see Oxford, England. On the domestic side, Sandy wants to go to Alaska. We haven’t set foot there or in Arkansas, Hawaii, Nebraska, or Oregon.

Cruises are big with some folks. We met a lady just back from a Viking cruise to the Adriatic coast plus Turkey, which she said she loved. The ship stopped at Dubrovnik in Croatia. Dubrovnik? Wikipedia calls it “one of the prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean.” We get the Viking brochures. I looked up the cruise: $4,600/person for the low-rent cabin, not counting airfare or tours ashore. We may not get there right away.

Some folks look at the world, or maybe just look at brochures or their National Geographics and sign up for their trips. They go with tour groups or in twos and threes or fours, or by themselves. They punch their tickets at interesting places but never go back. 

We have only so much time. We hope, like the wandering lover in “You Belong to Me,” to see the world and the infinite variety of God’s creation. But we listen one more time and realize the song isn’t about travel at all. Instead it expresses a woman’s generous love, an immensely greater gift than visits to the pyramids on the Nile and all monuments, museums, and cathedrals.

We go on talking about trips while living our lives, which now include an MRI to locate cancer. That and all our experiences fit together in some complicated, mystical way, as in the song’s apt title. The details fade into the swamp of daily life. We can fly off in the silver plane, or not. We all work hard to belong to each other. The trips are just sights along the way.  

September 5, 2022

Some places are a highway, a bridge, a traffic jam, or a generation too far. The upper reaches of the Bronx, New York’s northernmost borough, are a long trip even from New Jersey. The toll across the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge (“the George”) from Fort Lee, N.J., into the northern end of Manhattan now is $16 round-trip.

We made it to Jersey last month to see my sister-in-law, niece, and nephew, and got to the almost-famous Gotham City Diner along scruffy, all-Jersey U.S. 4, the direct route from Paterson to the George. But we scrubbed the Bronx tour which, really, would have been about resurrecting memories. Southern suburban quaintness plays games with how you think about New York.

In 1986 we moved from Nashville to Red Bank, N.J., 40 miles from the city, for one year. At first I warmed to that familiar, complicated place. Eventually it seemed like another country.       

I was born in New York City, but when I was a kid we moved to Jersey, about 15 miles west of the George. We took Route 4 to the bridge to visit my grandparents, my dad’s folks, in the Bronx. The bridge traffic flows under a crisscross of Manhattan streets across the East River (at that point called the Harlem River). The highway becomes the Cross Bronx Expressway, the continuation of I-95 to New England. We turned north onto University Avenue and crawled through traffic for four or five miles to Fordham Road.

In the years I grew up they lived on the fourth floor of a five-story walkup on a winding street named Father Zeiser Place. The street borders a large city park with a playground. The church where my parents were married is a block away at the busy Fordham and University intersection.

The Fordham neighborhood streets were lined with butcher and grocery shops with signs in Hebrew, small Italian eateries, inexpensive clothing stores. The sidewalks always were crowded with shoppers, commuters with briefcases and, on school days, Jewish boys wearing yarmulkes and Catholic kids in maroon school uniforms. Fordham University is a few blocks farther east. An Alexander’s department store anchored the neighborhood, next to the IRT subway station where the “A” train picks up and lets off en route to and from Manhattan with a stop at Yankee Stadium. The world-famous Bronx Zoo is nearby.  

In those years the George Washington Bridge toll was 50 cents. It went to $1.75 in 1975. By then my Bronx grandparents were gone. Even twenty years ago graffiti covered almost every wall.    

Every so often we’d drive to Queens to visit my maternal grandmother. That meant the George again, but we turned off the bridge onto the West Side Highway, now the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north-south along the Hudson then curls into a tunnel to Brooklyn. We’d slog through Brooklyn and into Queens—seemed like hours—then pass the Navy air station at Floyd Bennett Field and cross the giant Marine Bridge over Jamaica Bay. The south side of the bay is Rockaway Beach, part of a long narrow peninsula that fronts the Atlantic, a crowded beach community in summer, but somehow still a small town.

My mother and her two sisters and three brothers grew up there. In time they scattered. Now the Bronx and Queens, for our family, may as well be on the far side of the Atlantic. No one we’re related to is left in either.

A few years ago we drove from Virginia to a wedding out on Long Island. We spent a night in Jersey and took the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Staten Island into Brooklyn, but then detoured south and crossed, once again, the Marine Bridge into Rockaway. The Navy abandoned Floyd Bennett years ago, it’s now part of Gateway National Recreation Area, which extends from Rockaway marshland across New York harbor to New Jersey marshland, hence “Gateway.”  

Rockaway Beach is a tight grid of numbered streets, each prefaced with “Beach,” running north- south from the bay up to a boardwalk astride the beach and west-east from Beach 149th to Beach 6th. There the neighborhood ends at a giant freeway. It’s the far southern end of Queens, the Manhattan skyline is faintly visible in the distance. But Rockaway is still New York.

The beach streets still are lined with elaborate, sprawling homes, some a century old, many with roomy decks and porches. Here and there the homes now are squeezed between cramped-looking apartment buildings. We walked across the boardwalk and down to the beach. It was November and chilly, the ocean was gray and choppy, brushed by the wind, which pushed the surf against the hard sand. The beach was deserted, I spied a few folks hurrying along the boardwalk, which extends for a couple of miles east and west.  

The place had a familiar look. We browsed in a few shops, a young saleswoman enthusiastically pushed “Rockaway Beach” T-shirts. We picked out a couple, sure to stand out in Virginia. We stopped at a white-tablecloth restaurant with a look of faded elegance. A few oldsters were getting lunch, the corned beef. We took a booth and stepped back in time.

New York, to many Americans who don’t live there, means Manhattan: Broadway, Wall Street, Central Park, Trump Tower, unique icons of America. They remember 9/11, but the Bronx and Queens don’t register. Those are the Americans whose idea of New Yorkers is rich investment bankers, artsy, radical Greenwich Village types, and snobby Democrats who know little and care less about the rest of the country.

Then again, New Yorkers don’t pay much attention to what’s below the Mason-Dixon line, except maybe southern Florida, where many hope to end up in their sunset years. But those who emigrate still think of their hometown as the center of the universe. They say the right things, but for most New Yorkers everywhere beyond Jersey is an alien planet.

These days, as always, some young people pine to make the Big Apple scene, to feel the glitz, the vibe of the city that never sleeps. They concoct ways to get there, to snap their fingers to the beat of the Sinatra ballad. I left, everyone I knew and loved finally left, or died.

Some people and places vanish like dreams. Others remain with us forever. You go where you decide your life makes sense. That’s where you stay.

August 29, 2022

Some elements of reality, of everyday life, flow together with grace. True love and picnics, for example. Others, like anniversaries and PET scans, confront each other in strange, unnerving ways. Friday was our anniversary, 44 years, Thursday was my PET scan.

PET stands for positron emission tomography. A simple explanation is that it detects energy use in tissue, which can reveal cancer and other problems. A PET scan usually follows a CT, or computed tomography scan.

The hospital waiting room was deserted when I arrived around 4 PM. I looked out the big plate-glass front window at the flowing traffic. A guy in scrubs, the PET technician, approached from the end of a long corridor.

“Mr. Walsh? I’m Kelly,” he said. He pointed down the hall. “We go this way. How long since you’ve had anything to eat?” he asked. “You’re not diabetic, are you?” I shook my head.

We exited a back door and climbed into a trailer. I took a seat in a closet-sized space. Kelly checked my blood sugar, then inserted the IV. I sat still for 45 minutes, then walked to the next room and slid onto the platform. In twenty minutes I was on my way to the parking lot.

We looked at doing something special for the anniversary and checked out the resort town of Helen, Ga., the so-called “Bavarian village” of Georgia.  Instead we got a hotel room downtown.

Last year we were determined to go somewhere for the big day. Sandy found a “camper cabin” at Lake Hartwell, about 50 miles from home, the only state park rental that didn’t require a three-night stay. It was a pretty lakeside spot, but on the austere side: a bed, an overhead light, an air conditioner. You used the community bathhouse a couple of hundred yards away. No fun in the middle of the night.

Six months later I was cruising after three good CT scans each three months apart and three cheerful followups with the oncologist. The doc, a deep-Deep Southerner, consistently pulls off a sharp plaid shirt/solid tie ensemble, while our other medics turn out in sport shirts and running shoes. His quick, lighthearted wit made the appointments almost enjoyable. After the third good scan, in February, he let me skate for six months.

On Monday, at the Cancer Institute, he was all business. We met in a tiny treatment room, the usual place. He turned the computer monitor toward me and opened my last week’s CT scan. He pointed at a couple of gray shadows, “We have to look at these,” he said. “They might be nothing. I’m ordering a PET. That will tell us whether we need to biopsy.”

I had never thought of “biopsy” as a verb. He brought up my scan of last February, so long ago, and waved at the image. “Look here.” I looked. No shadow.

Friday, the anniversary, we headed downtown. Greenville has built a nice tourist business, with chic eateries and nightspots, a concert hall, a zoo, a gorgeous children’s museum, a beautiful ballpark, Fluor Field, which hosts a Red Sox farm club.

There’s Falls Park, which intersects Main Street along the less-than-mighty Reedy River, a pretty picnic and picture-taking spot. The locally famous 20-mile-long Swamp Rabbit Trail attracts runners, cyclists, strollers, dog-walkers. The trail passes through brand-new Unity Park, a lovely stretch of greenery that celebrates the long overdue reconciliation of whites and African Americans in a city and state once known for ironclad segregation, Jim Crow, and the Klan.

Our daughter Marie took charge of the anniversary, selecting the restaurant and making the reservation. We checked in and walked Main Street, gawking at the spectacle of the city. I leaned over the Main Street bridge to look at the river churning through the park. The evening crowd was out, heading for happy hour in cheerful Southern getups, sundresses, cutoff jean shorts, and bare shoulders for the girls, Clemson and USC tees and Bermudas for the guys. They weren’t all twenty- and thirty-somethings, I spotted some of our fellow geriatrics trying to have fun.

We worked our way into the weekend, taking stock. We’re holed up in this mid-size Deep South town, near the southern fringe of the Blue Ridge, a ten-minute drive from our grandkids and a lifetime away from northern Virginia’s snarling, traffic-choked subdivision sprawl. Also ten minutes from the nearest hospital, with its arsenal of state-of-the-art CT, MRI, and PET scanning equipment. I know the doctors, the admin people, the staff nurses, the scan techs.

We went for a walk after dinner, enjoying a mild evening with just a touch of summer mugginess, pleasant after the chilly restaurant. Billowing clouds had gathered, promising a storm, but it was comfortable. We explored some corners of the neighborhood we hadn’t seen before, which is most of it. The restaurants and bars all were packed, it was Greenville’s “Restaurant Week,” when you can get a great three-course meal for less money than usual, which these days still seems like a lot to me. We don’t get out much.

The PET report came in late that night with more detail than the CT, but really the same story. The dense medical language says something is going on in there. Most likely, if the doc wants a PET scan, something is going on. The report recommended an MRI “for further evaluation.”

The hotel had given us a 7th floor corner room, large and airy, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a bit disorienting if you stood close and looked down. We could gaze across the city, past the apartments, hotels, and office and industrial buildings that passes for a skyline.

Beyond all that were the hazy pale-blue mountains that trail down from North Carolina and run west to the big lakes, Keowee and Jocassee, and then to rugged, forested north Georgia.

We slept well, enjoyed breakfast, and walked through the popular downtown farmer’s market, where vendors sell gourmet coffee and chocolate, pasta, granola, something called kuka juice; also some farm products. We talked about the future. Another anniversary, another year.

August 22, 2022

When I wanted art supplies in Virginia I went to Michael’s, the big arts and crafts chain that competes head-on with Hobby Lobby. I liked the local Michael’s, it stocked the things I needed and did good work on some framing for us. The checkouts were fast and efficient.

Moving to a new community is an adventure, but it also means leaving things behind. When we arrived in South Carolina we needed a kitchen table and chairs, a microwave, a bedframe, a living-room chair. That took months. Finally, I needed some humble things, oil and acrylic paints and brush cleaner. I didn’t want to go far to get them. The nearest Michael’s is six miles away from our new place, through traffic. Hobby Lobby is two miles, an easy drive.

Hobby Lobby, based in Oklahoma City, with nearly 1,000 stores, postures as a “Christian” business. The stores are closed on Sundays. In early 2016 Hobby Lobby CEO David Green said, “under no circumstances could I vote for Donald Trump because he could do much, much damage to this country … to the extent of talking about someone’s anatomy,” referring to Trump’s comments about women that revealed him as a dirt-mouthed lecher. He said he probably would not vote.

In September he endorsed Trump, saying “Donald Trump has been steadfast in expressing his commitment to uphold the Constitution.” The anatomy comments were forgotten.

Green and his family funded construction of a so-called Museum of the Bible in Washington that opened in 2017. The museum purchased thousands of “biblical” artifacts from fly-by-night antiquities dealers. Many were found to have been smuggled out of Iraq. In 2017 a federal court forced the museum to return 5,500 items to Iraq and fined it $3 million.  In March 2020 experts revealed that all of the 16 items that the museum claimed were fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls were fake. The New York Times reported that in August 2021 Iraq reclaimed some 17,000 items held by the Greens’ museum.

Also in March 2020, when the pandemic set in and most businesses shut down, Hobby Lobby argued that it was an “essential” retailer. According to published sources, CEO Green said his wife received a message from God directing the chain to stay open. The stores closed a month later after a blast of criticism. The company furloughed employees without pay and encouraged them to apply for unemployment benefits.

As bizarre as this seems, it’s also exhausting. Some people refuse to shop at Hobby Lobby, just as others refuse to watch MSNBC or CNN. At this time of endless political nastiness, I didn’t want to find politics at the crafts store.

The Hobby Lobby near us looks like the one in our former Virginia community, advertised by giant boldface capital letters across the front of the building. I drove over through thick afternoon heat, hurried inside and met a blast of cold air.

I was in no hurry and wandered a bit. The long aisles are piled high with arts and crafts materials, artificial flowers, wicker furniture, prints of religious paintings, picture frames, plastic knockoffs of famous statues. You can get sewing gear, fabric, zippers, artificial Christmas trees. The book rack offers “best seller” inspirational works by well-known evangelists. Hobby Lobby also is the place for posters and plaques of the “God Bless Our Home” variety.

The store was running a sale, 40 percent off almost everything. I found my items quickly for slightly better prices than I paid at Michael’s, although the South Carolina sales tax (6 percent) is a tad higher than Virginia’s (5.3 percent). 

It was a mid-afternoon weekday, I thought I’d miss the store’s busier hours. I was the only male in four open checkout lines. No one was in a hurry. The cashiers smiled at each customer ahead of me, commenting on the attractiveness of each purchase, wrapping glass and other fragile items. In my line the customers, young, middle-aged, and older women, chatted with each other while the cashier finished wrapping and bagging.   

Some moms towed pre-school-age children who fidgeted and wandered, some of them grabbing packs of Skittles and candy and sneaking them into their mothers’ carts. Nearly all the moms retrieved and returned the stuff to the candy rack, some with a gentle lecture. One or two gave in and the kids tore off the wrappers and chomped on their treats.

The line inched forward. The drone of chitchat was in normal, occasionally animated voices, no whispering or hushed tones. The customers discussed prices and quality, whether Hobby Lobby had the best deals for this or that. The line stood still while an older lady politely disputed a price of an artificial floral arrangement. I held my items under my arm. I was alone on this errand, some of the women clearly had come in pairs or threes. No one spoke to me.

At checkout I handed the cashier my card. She gave me a businesslike nod and handled my purchase quickly with a “have a nice day.” Then I was out of there.

I wondered. Why did this errand seem strange? I’ve waited in lots of checkout lines. After decades living in the South I know something about Southerners, the reflexive, sunny openness and friendliness, but also, sometimes, an unsettling, dark remoteness. My native Yankee prejudices may have led me to read in the customers, in their manner, some hard-to-define social or political content. Maybe that’s unfair.

While waiting, my mind drifted to Hobby Lobby and politics. South Carolina, like David Green, went for Trump in a big way. The state, like the company, has its pervasive “evangelical” Christian tilt. Yet like everywhere in Trumpdom, the comments about women were excused, ignored, or forgotten. Same with the election denialism, the admiration for dictators, the moneygrubbing, the covid indifference, the racial and ethnic slurs.

At any rate, the ladies feel comfortable at Hobby Lobby, probably as comfortable as they feel at church. The shopping is a chore, but also an outing, a social thing, like coffee after Sunday services. Then too, maybe my Hobby Lobby checkout friends all voted for Biden. I think I’ll go back to Michael’s.  

August 15, 2022

The menu for the Broadway Pub and Grill in Jim Thorpe, Penn., was posted on the door. I looked it over and saw the hamburger priced at $20. Sandy and I kept walking. We found a shop a block further on and each got a sandwich for $15. Then we climbed in the van and drove away.

Jim Thorpe is tucked in a valley in east-central Pennsylvania, once anthracite coal-mining country. There’s one way in and out, U.S. 209, which intersects with I-476 about ten miles north. The downtown business district is built around an old railroad station. The narrow streets are dotted with cute shops and eateries. On a sunny summer day the streets were crowded with people, few of whom, I guessed, live in the town. In that way it’s like lots of other small American towns.

Trying not to be grumpy, I wonder about these places. The formula seems to be: a central business district with a couple of streets of well-preserved or restored buildings, maybe banks or hotel buildings with antique-looking 19th or early 20th century facades, and an old church or two with tall spires or bell towers. Then a depressed or stagnant local economy and a sense of hard times. Next, an energetic mayor or board of county supervisors or other local officials. They try to figure out how to revitalize things. The answer: tourists.

I’m reaching here, but just a little. It appears that decisionmakers in many places have made this calculation. They commission a study that finds that tourists are attracted to shopping, eating, and drinking in places that convey some historical ambiance.

Old Town Alexandria, Va., may be a baseline. It’s filled with rowhouses, churches, and other buildings dating to the 18th century. Many sidewalks are cobblestone or old brick, lined with beautiful gardens. Then there’s the restaurants. In the 33 years we lived in Virginia we ate dozens of meals in Old Town cafes and bistros. Our daughter had her wedding rehearsal dinner there. So do lots of other couples. People actually live in Old Town, although visitors probably wonder who can afford to buy there.

The economic engine is tourism. Old Town usually is crowded with people shopping, eating, and drinking, some local for sure, but mostly from other cities and states, and other countries. It’s a model for downtown prosperity.

You can find a mix of places, large and small, that use the Old Town model: Portsmouth, N.H., West Chester, Penn., East Hampton, N.Y., Cape May, N.J., Bozeman, Mont. Next to our old hometown is Occoquan, Va. Within our driving range is Hendersonville, N.C., where Main Street is a highway of cuteness, with restaurants, bars, coffee shops, art galleries, boutiques. So is Brevard, a bit farther north, although there’s also a college. Christmas shopping is very big. Leavenworth, Wash., remade itself as a Bavarian village on the advice of economists at the state university.

The formula isn’t exact, for example, neither West Chester nor East Hampton are depressed. Some have natural tourism draws; East Hampton and Cape May have beaches. The history angle is more prominent in some places, but every place can claim historical nuggets. Portsmouth played an active role in the American Revolution. West Chester was incorporated in 1799. Bozeman became a base for settling the West. Occoquan was a key Civil War Potomac River port. And so on.

Plenty of places are named after people. Very few other towns are named with a personal name and surname, among them Albert Lea, Minn., Carol Stream, Ill., George West, Texas.

Back to Jim Thorpe. There’s history there, too. Jim Thorpe, born in 1887, was Native American, raised on the Sac and Fox reservation in Oklahoma. He won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympic Games. A year later the International Olympic Committee revoked his medals when he admitted he had played professional baseball so had lost his amateur status. The medals were restored in 1983, 30 years after his death.

Thorpe starred in pro football and baseball. In 1950 a poll of sportswriters voted him the “greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century.” In 1999 an Associated Press poll named him third on a list of greatest athletes of the century.

Yet Thorpe led a troubled life, became a serious alcoholic, and ended up broke. When he died in 1953 his body lay in state in his hometown of Shawnee, Okla. His third wife, Patricia, without telling the rest of his family, shipped his body to the Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, which promised to erect a memorial, and allegedly paid her for the remains.

The two towns placed Thorpe in a marble tomb and erected two statues of him. The towns merged and took the name Jim Thorpe. Later his family sued to have him returned to Oklahoma. After years of legal back-and-forth, in 2014 an appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs—the family—could not use a federal statute to win return of the body. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So Thorpe remains in Jim Thorpe, a place he never visited.  

Downtown, along Lehigh Avenue, visitors can ride on the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railroad. They can dine and drink at Molly Maguire’s Irish Pub. A block away, on Race Street, you find the Jim Thorpe Massage and Wellness Studio and Muggie’s Mug, a coffee bar. There’s a hibachi-sushi gastropub, a bed & breakfast, and The Inn at Jim Thorpe. There’s a Fall Foliage Festival and Jim Thorpe’s Olde Time Christmas, an Anthracite Triathlon, and an art foundation. 

Uptown, along North Street across the Lehigh River, we passed blocks of frame houses, many needing a coat of paint, some with broken porch railings, others with scruffy lawns and cracked walkways. The streets were largely deserted. Next to the tourist scene, North Street might have been in another state. I got a sense that hard times still linger. I guessed people from the neighborhood work in the downtown shops and restaurants. The town needs the jobs.

The Carbon County Chamber of Commerce is in Lehighton, a few miles away. They’ve done well reinventing the old coal town. Jim’s tomb, on the outskirts, is impressive. No one else was around when we stopped by, but I guess it brings the visitors. Or the pubs and shops do. Hard to tell.