With the weekend upon us, what better time to reprise a weekend ride story that I did about 10 years ago for Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser?
It was the weekend and I wanted to go for a ride.
Then it hit me.
What better place could there be for a mild-mannered reporter for a large metropolitan daily newspaper like me to go than Metropolis?
That's Metropolis, as in Illinois.
Metropolis, as we all know, is the mythical home of Superman and the folks there play their comic book connection to the hilt. I'd read about Metropolis' Superman fixation in Roadside America – a fabulous compendium of tourist attractions and cultural goofiness and I promised myself I'd go there someday.
This, I decided, was the day. Consulting a map, I realized a trip to Metropolis is a serious day ride from Indianapolis. The round trip amounts to about 600 miles. Undaunted, I picked up Ind. 67 on the southwestside of town and followed it through Spencer and on to Vincennes where I connected with U.S. 50 and headed west toward Illinois.
As I crossed the Wabash River on the Red Skelton Bridge, I reflected that this is the same U.S. 50 that LIFE magazine once dubbed “the loneliest road in America” where it traverses Nevada. Some friends and I blazed down that highway at slightly sub-sonic speeds in July, 1986, on our way to a BMW rally in California and decided it was one of the most exciting roads in America.
A few miles into Illinois, I exited U.S. 50 to head southwest on Ill. 1 through Mt. Carmel and Carmi to pick up U.S. 45 and took it to I-24 and the sleepy little Ohio River town of Metropolis.
It was mid-afternoon by the time rode by a colorful billboard sporting a flying Superman that welcomed me in the name of the Metropolis Chamber of Commerce.
Metropolis, Ill., looks more like Smallville – Superman's boyhood hometown – than it does the sprawling clone of New York City where Superman/Clark Kent hangs out in comic books, films and TV series. It's an inconsistency the folks in Metropolis apparently choose to ignore.
After a few minutes' search, I found the town square where a colorful 15-foot-tall bronze statue of the Man of Steel gazes down Market Street from behind an iron fence. The statue guards the city hall and stands on a pedestal celebrating “Truth – Justice – The American Way.” I parked my bike next to the fence and dodged a land yacht full of elderly tourists to line up a photo of Superman and super bike.
Diagonally across the street from the statue is the Super Museum – a 50,000-item collection of Superman stuff amassed by Jim Hambrick. It was recently named by AAA Auto Travel as the top small-town tourist attraction in America.
Inside, I found myself staring at a dizzying array of Supermanalia. Besides the obvious things like collector pins, t-shirts, sweatshirts, ball caps, shot glasses, thimbles, key rings, squeezy plastic coin purses, comic books, postcards and figural scissors there were unexpected items. There were red and green bottles of Kryptonite Super Hot Sauce with a sign warning, “You’ll run for water faster than a speeding bullet!!!” On the shelves below were rows of Kraft Super Heroes Macaroni & Cheese, offering a choice of Superman, Batman or Wonder woman.
Making my way through the forest of gee-gaws, I found Hambrick’s daughter, Carrie, 20, minding the store from behind a counter that controlled access to the fabulous museum that lay beyond.
Dressed in black, Carrie projected a Gothic style, complete with multiple ear piercings. She looked up from her Anne Rice novel to take my $3 museum admission and answer a few questions.
“What’s your biggest seller here?” I asked.
“T-shirts, magnets… I’d say these Kryptonite rocks are third,” she said, gesturing to a pile of shiny green rocks, each about the size of a child’s fist. The sign next to them announced, “Kryptonite Meteor Fragments from Superman’s home planet! Glows in the Dark! $3.95 each.”
“What are they?”
“Original Ohio River rocks,” Carrie said with a smile. “Painting them is part of my job. I paint them first in dark green, then I take a light green and go over it. Then I take an even brighter green and do a little bit. Then I put glow-in-the-dark paint on them, then I spray them with clear acrylic and then I, like, sprinkle glitter on them and spray them again. It takes about an hour.”
Next to the rocks lay a stack of year-old special Superman Celebration inserts from the local paper, The Planet. Since it’s a weekly, they can’t call it the The Daily Planet, but everyone gets the idea. Metropolis celebrates its Superman connection every year on the second weekend in June with a blowout that draws about 50,000 visitors. The festival has featured appearances by Noel Neill and Jack Larson who played Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson on the 1950s Superman TV series and Margot Kidder, who was Lois Lane in the more recent Superman movies.
The celebration is a big deal at the museum, Carrie said, when serious Superman collectors gather for a dinner and an auction.
“Some of them even walk around in Superman costumes,” she said. “They call themselves the League of Justice.”
The late Kirk Alyn was the first actor to play Superman in a 1948 movie serial and the elder Hambrick worked as his manager in the early 1980s. The Hambricks lived in California then, Carrie said, and “Kirk Alyn was always at our home. He was like a family member… Superman is like my grandfather.”
Turning the image of a grandfatherly Superman over in my mind, I thanked Carrie for sharing and entered the museum section.
The museum is an amazing jumble of valuable Superman memorabilia and toys and Super clutter. The discerning eye will pick out the knitted costume George Reeves wore in the ‘50s TV series. Turning the corner, my heart skipped a beat when I spotted Clark Kent’s horn-rimmed glasses from that series. Suddenly, I was back in the third grade with my first pair of nerdy eyeglasses, telling myself I was really just using them to hide my secret identity.
There’s Helen Slater’s flying harness from the 1984 Supergirl movie, a life mask casting of Marlon Brando's face in his role as Jor-El, Superman’s dad, and some actual “crystals” from the Fortress of Solitude. Mixed in are odd items like Superman suspenders and belts, all kinds of Superman toys, a huge assortment of Superman wrist watches… it goes on and on.
You can even step into a 1960s vintage phone booth, complete with a dial pay phone, and imagine yourself peeling down to the familiar red, yellow and blue costume.
A couple of headless plywood Superman cutouts stand outside the Super Museum as an invitation for passersby to have their heads photographed on Superman's body.
Metropolis got serious about its Super tourist potential in 1972 when plans were unveiled for a $50 million Amazing World of Superman theme park. The project fell through, however, for lack of investors.
In 1986, civic-minded Metropolisites raised $1,000 to install a cheesy-looking seven-foot-tall fiberglass likeness of Superman on the town square. According to Roadside America, vandals wanted to see just how bullet-proof the Man of Fiberglass was and shot him full of holes.
Seven years later, townspeople bought hundreds of engraved paving bricks to raise $120,000 for the present two-ton effigy of the cartoon superhero.
Metropolis' other major attraction is down at the riverfront where Merv Griffin's Riverboat Casino is berthed.
I decided to pass on the casino and, instead, headed toward the north side of town on my last quest of the day. I found it just north of the Metropolis Good Samaritan Nursing Home – the street I knew had to be somewhere in Metropolis.
Lois Lane, of course.
The Super Museum & Souvenir Store, 611 Market Street, Metropolis, IL is open from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. or later every day of the year, holidays included.
