Lesson #420: Oklahoma’s State Vegetable

Buckle up, guys, because we are in for some serious ??? here.

The state vegetable of Oklahoma is…the watermelon.

I know.

In 2007, the state’s House of Representatives passed a bill by a vote of 78 people who clearly don’t know what a vegetable is to 19 sane people who have eaten watermelon before, declaring the watermelon the state vegetable.*

I think the best part of this is that the man who introduced the bill in the Senate was all “FAKE NEWS!” about watermelon being a fruit nearly a full decade before Donald Trump decided that facts are optional. Nothing to see here. Move along.

It has not, however, been smooth sailing for the vegetable watermelon. In 2015, a bill designed to revoke the watermelon’s official status — on the basis that everyone except for the 78 people in the Oklahoma House who voted for the bill in the first place knows that watermelon is a fruit — was put forth in the Senate. It seems not to have passed. The watermelon remains listed as the state vegetable.

*For the record, the state fruit is the strawberry. Which is a fruit. Batting .500, there, Oklahoma.

An Addendum to Lesson #161: In Which I Attend My First Drive-In Movie(s)

A year(ish) ago, I wrote a post about drive-ins and mentioned that I’d never been to one, despite having had plenty of opportunity in my teenaged years (and later, when I lived in a southern state) to do so.

With Cowboys & Aliens opening yesterday, I sent my movie-watching friend an email on Tuesday saying only, “Cowboys, aliens, you, me and beer?” She countered with a suggestion of hitting the local drive-in (in other news, we have a local drive-in) for a triple header involving Captain America and two other movies I didn’t like anywhere near as much.

Drive in? YES!

The friend I went with had also never been to the drive-in, so when we got there and discovered that there were swingsets near the screen, we both geeked out hard on the “IT’S JUST LIKE IN GREASE!” aspect of it. Because for both of us, the drive-in scene in Grease is about the only reference point we have to drive-ins.*

*Don’t judge me!

Lesson #161: Drive-ins

My brother called from Boston last night to work out a few details about my impending move/visit to see him as I pass through. Somehow in the course of our hour long conversation, we got onto the subject of movies. He and his wife went to the drive-in last night to see Iron Man, which he recommended — I saw in Jerusalem — and Shrek 4, which he thought was stupid — which I had guessed from the previews. I have never been been to the drive-in.

Somewhere years ago, I heard that there were only about 50 operational drive-ins remaining in the United States. This was probably around the time my friends and I went apple picking in the backwoods of Maryland one weekend and ended up making friends with the owner of the local drive-in. Somewhere, there are pictures. That place is shut down now. It might even have been shut down then, but the screen was still there as was the little cafe next to it where we had lunch.

Imagine my surprise when I decided to go see what I could find out about drive-ins now and discovered that there is a whole website dedicated to telling you where to go, should you want to go. According to said website, there are 374 drive-ins operating in 47 states (all but Alaska, Delaware and Louisiana) and 66 across Canada.

The highest concentration of drive-ins run across the steel belt: Pennsylvania has the most active drive-ins with 34, followed by Ohio which has 30 and Indiana rounds out the top four with 20.* I don’t know if this says something in particular or if it’s just a coincidence.

1958 was the peak year for the popularity of the drive-in with 4063 open theatres, including 382 in Texas alone.** Popularity began to wane in 1959 and plateaued for a few years in the late 60s and early 70s (between 1967 and 1972, the number of drive-ins slid only from 3384 to 3342)*** before falling again. The downfall was fairly consistent until the mid-1980s when the number of drive-ins was reduced by 25% to 999 in 1986, the first time the number had been under 1000 since 1948 when there were 820. There was a continued slow decline in the 1990s and the numbers leveled off in the 2000s with more or less 400 open drive-ins.

Your Jeopardy trivia tidbit for the day: The first drive-in was opened in Camden, New Jersey in June 1933.

*New York is third with 29.

**I’ve lived in Texas; somehow this makes perfect sense.

***As a historian, I find this very interesting because these were the peak years of global revolutionary fervour and in the US, anti-war sentiment.

Lesson #38: Anvil Shooting

So there I am, just minding my own business looking for something to distract me from my research for a few minutes and what do I find? A video in which someone who is apparently the world record holder in anvil shooting manages to launch an anvil a couple hundred feet into the air.

What?

So it turns out that every April, a little town in Mississippi called Laurel hosts the World Anvil Shooting Championships. The point? To launch an anvil as high in the air as possible using gunpowder.*

It’s pretty awesome!

*A video explaining anvil shooting is here, a video of world champion anvil shooter Gay Wilkinson can be seen here, an awesome video from a demonstration can be watched here and a really great article from the St. Louis News, which includes quotes from Wilkinson, among others, and descriptions of the rules and classes of the championships can be read here.