The Fabulous Thunderbird
I followed a link on onebee this morning to Deadburb USA, a photo-essay about a Richfield, Minnesota neighborhood and its adventures in eminent domain. After reading that, I was amazed to see that it was just one more it's-a-small-web-after-all click to the same photographer's exploration of the Fabulous Thunderbird motel.
I first stayed at the Thunderbird when my family lived in Mason City, Iowa. One summer, the Thunderbird was the vacation destination of the family of my childhood friend Todd Eldridge. I was invited to come along with them; I remember that we made the three-hour drive from Mason City to Bloomington sitting in the cargo area of their Suburban. (Was it a Suburban? I wish I could remember for sure. It was a jeep-looking SUV-precursor, that much is for sure, from before anyone realized they were called SUVs and before anyone was really all that worried about seatbelts.) In any case, the extended weekend at the Thunderbird was pretty damn sweet for third grade me, all that Indian stuff. So cool, in fact, that Todd and I looted plastic ice buckets bearing the Thunderbird motif, which I kept buttons and pencils and stuff in for years afterwards.
The Thunderbird later became the site of TwinCon, an ultimately doomed Twin Cities gaming convention that had a few really good years. Those years coincided with the period when gaming — playing and running them, as opposed to writing them — was a huge force in my adolescent life. TwinCon was eventually run into the ground by, as I recall, a combination of incompetence and malfeasance. (But remember that I was in high school at the time, and in addition to not being a TwinCon insider, I had no appreciation for the political subtleties of volunteer organizations.) In any case, TwinCon's real contribution to gaming in the Twin Cities was to piss off a handful of its senior organizers so much that they started a rival convention, Con of the North, which persists to this day.
Someone told me once that the Thunderbird is owned by some favored son of the Minnesota Independent Republican party. That story — true or not, I have no idea — came up in a conversation in which someone wondered why so many of the IR election night victory parties in Minnesota are held there.
For some reason, it's good to know the Thunderbird is still out there, abiding, taking reservations. It's the Jeffrey Lebowski of motels. For those of you that know the place, think about how easily "Thunderbird" slips in here:
The [Thunderbird] abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' [it]'s out there. The [Thunderbird]. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope [it] makes the finals.
Comments
I was just there!