Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 50

E2 ALBUQUERQUE JOUlPftlj'; Sunday, August 4, 1985 "i 4,1 i iuMJl i.f. i-n-rn-nin- JOURNAL PHOTOS EUGENE BURTON The views east on Lomas from 4th, at left, and west on Grand from 1-25 are examples of the beneficial effect of trees. Is Mo acl Step 'Television Right Upgrading V.B. Price Li -J beneficial effect of trees. Landscaping in parking lots that requires private sector financing and upkeep might be subsidized in part by the Trust Fund if its enacting ordinance permits.

Though covering up with landscaping is the first, and the easiest, step, altering the streetscapes themselves is the ultimate solution. The city needs to make over the Television Roads and to avoid making any more of them in the future. Altering existing strip environments contributes to a better prototype for the future than pure landscaping does. Ultimately what is called for is reclamation. The fundamental elements in such an undertaking, after landscaping, include sign control, design criteria for building facades, street portals and parking lot design itself.

Television Roads, as much as anything, are parking lot tributaries, and parking lot design is the most challenging, if not to say nettlesome, problem to be faced. But with public money from the Urban Enhancement Trust Fund, the city might even sponsor design competitions for reclamation of parking lots and street treatments as well. Commercial strips in Albuquerque today are so oppressive that almost anything done to reclaim them will be a blessed improvement. Because so much of the city (and the county, for that matter) suffers under their influence, for Albuquerque to make a serious contribution to their redesign would make us not only "self benefactors," but champions of humane urbanity nationwide. That's not a bad role for a city trying to make a name for itself as an up-and-coming place to live.

television, on a national 'programmed' experience." Television Road in Albuquerque, as in other cities, is programmed with the architectural equivalents of commercials, franchise symbols and their locally generated stylistic clones that bury hometown identity in public relations messages from far and wide. But as the Fifties Strip was an honest representation of its times, so is the Television Road a reflection of modern commercial preoccupations. And if the council approves the recommended beautification through landscaping of a major Television Road here, it too will honestly reflect the values of our times, those progressing quality-of-life concerns that are behind the whole notion of the Urban Enhancement Trust Fund. It's probably not possible to make the Northeast Heights monster streets over into an updated version of mainstreet Albuquerque, but it might be possible through landscaping, and later through some inspired and subsidized design-zoning criteria to at least make them humane. Although many sections of Central Avenue today retain admirable qualities of the Fifties Strip, the Television Roads of the Northeast Heights are basically worthless in themselves.

Improving them means covering them up and altering them. They can be covered up with street trees and shrubbery, as well as with parking lot plantings. The publicly funded landscaping of Lomas NW from 4th to Central or Grand west from 1-25 are good examples of the What a happy irony it would be if 20 years from now a formidable commercial strip such as Eubank, Wyoming, Juan Tabo or Montgomery had been transformed from an urban blight into an historic success story by actions taken this election year. It could happen. The Albuquerque City Council's Land Use, Planning and Zoning Committee has voted unanimously to recommend that $300,000 be spent on the beautification of one or more of the as-yet-unspecified Northeast Heights monster streets.

The full council will consider the recommendation Monday. The money would come from interest on the $6 million Urban Enhancement Trust Fund established by the council last year. If the concept is approved, it could turn out to be one of those unlikely, out-of-the-blue, landmark decisions that begins to change the quality of a city's development. Commercial strips are as much a part of Albuquerque's urban culture as adobes are. The city has been a crossroads for much of its existence.

In postwar Albuquerque, Route 66 and U.S. 85 converged at Fourth and Central Downtown, which 30 years ago was still the city's major commercial intersection. In the 1940s and '50s, these superhighways became, within the city limits, overdeveloped boulevards of commerce, prototypes of today's commercial strips. But they had a certain neon charm about them. The ancestral strips were filled with New Mexican businesses and New Mexican design motifs, seen chiefly in cafes and adobe motels.

In the 1980s, Albuquerque's urban sprawl and generic American culture has created business strips that deface the New Mexican-ness of the city, business strips that are little better than gigantic supermarket aisles in which to drive one's shopping-cart of a car. The differences beween ancestral and modern commercial strips is seen in the current issue of Landscape magazine. California architect Kent MacDonald makes a fascinating distinction between the strips of the '50s and the strips of the '80s. The "Fifties Strip," as he calls it, "emerged from Main Street. It was inspired by the proliferation of cars and a new audience of mobile Americans." In the '80s, the strip has become "the Television Road," an extension of national corporate culture, with little local identity.

The Television Road, writes MacDonald, "offers no adventure, only the known and previously experienced. It is a preconfronted landscape, bereft of local meaning both because of its subordination to a national network of identical places, and because of its dependence, via useum's 'Ten Seconds' Still Shake the World Sculptor's Nuclear Garbage 'Rests on Vibrational LeveP CONTINUED FROM PAGE El "She was absolutely charming and very gracious. She put me at ease in a minute," said Ditrick. Ditrick was still in Naples when Hiroshima was bombed. "I suppose you want to know my reaction.

Well, you know we were packing and crating things and preparing for the invasion of Japan. So the reaction was, the job has not been completed. Japan is still in the war. But we dropped our hammers and saws and came home. Relieved? Or course we were.

"Back then, we didn't understand the bomb. Even now you toy around with the idea. Should we have dropped it? Shoot, I don't have the answer." Ditrick worked in Army counterintelligence in Japan and Korea from 1947 to 1952, then switched to nuclear weapons inspection and repair. He was appointed curator of the new Atomic Museum by Gen. John Honeycutt in 1969, and retired as a chief warrant officer in 1971.

Two years ago he returned to Japan and was delighted at the welcome he received from old friends. Up until a couple years ago, the museum went through two or three prints of "Ten Seconds" per year at about $500 each. Now they simply replace the first 50 feet of the film, the part which seems to wear out the quickest. "If the soundtrack ever went out, I could probably do as good a job as Richard Basehart," Ditrick laughed. Alamos.

There is the dramatic count-down for the July 16, 1945 test of the "Fat Man" bomb at Trinity near Socorro; Truman, Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam; bloody combat in the South Pacific; the take-off from Tinian Island by the Enola Gay and its $2-billion bomb; and the holocaust of Hiroshima. "Ten Seconds" ends on an upbeat note with rebuilt Hiroshima "the will, mind and spirit of man triumphs" and America's "new breed" of atomic scientists who work for peace. Ditrick, who enlisted in the Army in 1941, served in North Africa, Sicily an Italy. In 1943, he was in Naples when actress Marlene Dietrich came through to entertain the troops. A general's aide, who thought it would be fun to introduce a Ditrick to a Dietrich, assigned Eugene to be her escort for two days.

At night they stood outside, with air raid sirens wailing and ack-ack guns blasting, and watched the flash of German bombs near the city. Germans weren't very good at it. They had lost the war but didn't know it Before she left, La Dietrich consented to let Ditrick photograph her and struck a pose just like in the "Blue Angel," the 1930 movie that made her a star. "She sat on a table. A bunch of GIs were standing around.

I only had two or three pictures left. She was sitting there and pulled her dress up a little bit. The GIs all chorused 'Higher! She reached a certain point and said, 'That's high junkie) and a group of other scientists there to give me stuff to sell through the store. "Anything I saw that I thought I could use as sculpture, I would grab it and use it as a sculpture part. And so they'd come visit the store and there I'd be slamming some thousand-dollar part into some sculpture and there'd be an 'Oh, no! What's he doing to But despite the discomfort of fitting art into a life with little gilt on it.

Price has no regrets. "We'll all die in a nuclear war. I know my work won't slop war, won't stop weapons development but just maybe it will help hold the peace. It is my prayer that nuclear energy systems be dismantled and the technology of such be forgotten, for radioctivity is a dead-end channel to nothingness." CONTINUED FROM PAGE El 1 of money. "I make enough to support myself but no more.

The heart of the beast has always been a monetary thing. I put whatever I have into it, but it's not enough. It's a cross to bear, that's all," he said. Price does sell his nuclear-age artifacts on a regular basis, but stone sculptures are his real bread and butter granite and marble portraits of Native Americans. "They sell like hotcakes.

People love them, but I'm not really sure why," he said. He ran a store called Atomic Surplus for a short time out on Cerillos Road, reselling salvage purchased in Los Alamos but the artist in the man put the businessman out of business in short order. "In the early years, I actually got Ed (Grothus, a famous Los Alamos junk James Chadwick to Enrico Fermi who splits the atom "without knowing it." The migration of Einstein and other scientists fleeing Hitler's Germany is compared to "the transferral of the Vatican to the New World." Fermi is shown thumbing his nose at Mussolini by bowing to King Gustav of Sweden while accepting the Nobel Prize instead of giving the Fascist salute. Fermi then used the prize money to emigrate to America where he produced the first controlled chain reaction in the squash courts beneath Stagg Field at the Univeristy of Chicago. There are other scenes with intriguing insights.

Einstein's letter (ghostwritten by physicist Edward Teller) calling for atomic bomb research is filed away by President Roosevelt with the note "we must do something about this." The word "atom" is censored from all newspapers, including the comic strip "Flash Gordon." Ten tons $300 million worth of the U.S. Treasury's silver coins are melted down for wire at the Oak Ridge, Tenn. uranium plant where only illiterate trash collectors are hired to protect atomic secrets. Gen. Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project and "the man who built the Pentagon," talks about the "enormous expense of assembling the greatest collection of crackpots" including J.

Robert Oppenheim-er and a dozen Nobel Prize winners at Los 1 Oak Ridge Boy Lauds 'Diversity' 4 "I I I III KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS i ,7:1 tin u. i in i i Down Under Winner "Rory's Jester," an oil-on-masonite painting by artist Bob Lee of Los Lunas, will be on display in the Jockey Club of Santa Fe Downs during today's races. It will then be flown to the Sidney Turf Club of Sidney, Australia, which commissioned the work. The club commissioned the painting after the horse's victory in the 1985 running of that country's most prestigious horse race the Golden Slipper 0 Oak Ridge Boys are just so-so." "Country music is just as diversified as rock or pop music. That's what makes it so great.

It has something to offer everyone. Remember when country radio and country music was at its peak, with people like Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbit all having big country and pop records? It was because the music was so different; no one in country music sounded like anyone else and it gave people something that they couldn't find in rock or pop." After cutting several country music albums and winning most of the major country music awards, including five Grammy Awards, the group is not about to sit back and rest. "We want to maintain the standards we have set for ourselves. We have to keep the quality level up in our music and our concerts. We want to continue to be enthused and excited about what we're doing.

If we ever lose the feeling for performing and making music, we might as well hang it up." A few words with Joe Bonsell, a member of the Oak Ridge Boys. For the last 10 years, the Oak Ridge Boys have never been off the country music charts. They're one of the few country acts to have a platinum single, winning it for probably their best-known record outside of country music. "We've always been diversified; that's the key to our success. We started out as a gospel harmony quartet, then we switched to country, but we can also sing pop and rock.

We appeal to middle America and entire families from Granny on down to the kids." The group prides itself on being one of the hardest working groups in the music business. "We try to give our fans their money's worth, because we honestly care about the folks who come out to see us. Every person that comes to see us is important and we have to please them or else they're going to tell people that the -JMWMMiiM 1 PHOTO DANIEL GIBSON.