At breakfast this morning, my grand-daughter Opal brought along two books: Angry Animals, in the Horrible Science series from UK Scholastic, and volume 4 of The Popularity Papers by Amy Ignatow, in a series about two best friends, Lydia Goldblatt and Julie Graham-Chang. In the current book, Lydia and Julie have just finished sixth grade and are setting off on a “rocky road trip” across the US to visit with their grandparents; family drama plays a big role in the book.
Along the way, one of Julie’s fathers drags them to off-beat roadside attractions, including two in Illinois: the Kaskaskia Dragon (which breathes real fire) and The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle. The girls are totally taken with the dragon, and feed it with $1 tokens again and again and again to get more fire. They are less taken with the catsup bottle, but it occasions a argument about semantics: is the structure, a water tower disguised as a catsup bottle, a structure that has never contained catsup (or ketchup — the girls argue about spelling, too), actually a catsup bottle?
These are real roadside attractions, so I can show you photographs.
The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle occasioned discussion around the breakfast table of other structures that are billed as The World’s Largest X, The Giant X, or The Big X. These are common in the US and in Australia (where they constitute a kind of national preoccupation; there’s even a Wikipedia page on The Big Things of Australia). Opal’s mother has visited a fair number of these, so she could talk with some authority on big roadside attractions.
Meanwhile, Opal really wants to experience the Kaskaskia Dragon and was disappointed to hear just how long the trip from Palo Alto to Kaskaskia is.
