I spotted the above mini-van while driving on Route 66 scouting locations yesterday. We took it as an interesting omen.
One of the interesting things about location scouting is that you always run across interesting things that you weren’t really looking for. On this trip we stopped by historic Fort Reno. The kind and informative lady that was worked at the place gave us lots of information about the land rush, ghosts, some guys getting hanged in an elevator shaft and the fact that the place was once a World War II POW camp for captured German soldiers. With visions of Abu Ghraib in my head, I was relieved to find out that they did things quite a bit different in the old days.
At Fort Reno, the prisoners didn’t have it too bad. During the day they actually served as labor for the local community doing things like construction, farm work, shoe repair and even working for bakeries. But this was far from slave labor… the employers paid the government which then paid the prisoners an hourly wage. They even had their own canteen where they could buy cigarettes, luxury items and up to two pints of beer a day. The canteen made a profit which was in turn used to buy things like radios, gramophones, magazines and other things to be used around the camp.
So even though these Germans were prisoners of war, the whole thing was handled in a way that was pretty damn humane and also financially benefited the local community and the federal government. The farmers got cheap labor, the government made some cash, the prisoners got cigarettes, beer and magazines. The situation was so beneficial that a lot of the local farmers who hired the prisoners kept in touch with them long after they returned to Germany.
The Fort is also supposedly haunted by all kinds of ghosts. It’s a little spooky during the day time, I can only imagine it’s pretty scary at night.
Speaking of scary, I spent quite a bit of time walking around this junkyard. It’s so big that I got lost in it and literally could not see the road we came in on. The pictures don’t do it justice.
