This place is a gas

ROSTRAVER TOWNSHIP, Pa. – The Fairway Inn is off the beaten track, and mostly seen by people who pass their time across the street at the popular Cedarbrook Golf Course.

The bar owners obviously are ticked about the record-high price of gasoline and have a sense of humor, judging by this sign outside the business along Route 981, just off Route 51.

Truth be told, the food they serve is pretty good, better than can be found at most restaurants in the Mid Mon Valley. And the beer is served cold at this inn in Rostraver Township.

(Hey, e-mail us a photo of your favorite "signz" with a description of them and we might post them...)

A sign from the Lone Star State

This sign comes to “Travel with a Beveridge” from Wise George, a blogger whose brother apparently knows all the best bars in Austin, Texas.

With our small budget, we’d definitely come back to Dirty Martin’s Kum-Bak Place on the strip near the University of Texas at Austin for a double meat burger with cheese costing 60 cents. And, no doubt, there is a line this very minute out its door because of ridiculous inflation rates that will soon have most of us eating kidney beans out of a can.

George the wise one tells us that business has been going strong at the Kum-Bak since 1926, and getting better since management got in the habit of mopping the floor.

(Hey, e-mail us a photo of your favorite "signz" with a description of them and we'll consider posting them ...)

Signs across America

Travel with a Beveridge introduces today an occasional series of landmark or just plain odd signs along back roads or highways in the United States.

Here is a fading landmark Grain Belt Beer billboard on Niccolet Island alongside the Hennepin Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minn.

During the Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, the brand went undercover as the Grain Belt Juice Co.

To celebrate the return of legal booze, the company erected this sign in 1940 with blinking lights that spelled out the beer's return to barroom taps.

The beer was first produced 1893 by the Minneapolis Brewing Co. to honor farming in America’s heartland. August Schell came to the rescue of the fledging brewer in 2002 and continues to produce two labels, Grain Belt Premium and Premium Light.

Hey, e-mail us a photo of your favorite "signz" with a description of them and we'll consider posting them.

Our Miss Liberty was once dead in the water

NEW YORK – America wasn’t so united about France’s offer of a gift of the Statute of Liberty when it was time to raise money to give her a resting place.

People across the great land scoffed at the idea of raising money to pay for a pedestal for the monumental copper and steel sculpture because it was supposed to be, well, a gift.

“Ordinary citizens considered the colossus a rich man’s folly; many rich felt it a populist symbol,” a sign states at a museum inside the granite structure below Miss Liberty that we now consider a global tribute to independence.

But in 1876, after French artist Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi brought a 30-foot arm from his design of the statue to Philadelphia, U.S. newspapers criticized the nearly $300,000 cost of the statue’s underfunded base. Many believed that New Yorkers should be responsible for the price tag until journalist Joseph Pulitzer came to the rescue and urged subscribers to his newspapers to send money while also criticizing the rich for ignoring the call for donations. Pulitzer’s mission brought home the $100,000 that was needed to complete that 10-story base to support the statue that, itself, is 151 feet and 1 inch tall.

I felt like kicking myself with her big foot Saturday for not taking a tour of this island during my several prior trips to New York. It’s indeed a wonder of the world.

The million folks who tour the site each year are just permitted to climb to the base of the statue, up 154 steep steps, to peek into its frame through a Plexiglass window. After making the climb, I found an enthusiastic, young female National Park Service ranger who was well versed in trivia about the big lady above the observation tower.

The ranger said part of the $10 million restoration project that led up the 100th birthday party for the statue in 1986 involved the removal of 7 layers of asbestos coatings around its metal joints. The substance contributed to saltwater erosion that was damaging the sculpture. It was replaced with joints of stainless steel coated with Teflon.

The perch offers great vantage points to see Lower Manhattan, as well as weird ant’s-eye views of Liberty.






If you visit, plan to spend the better part of the day at the statue and nearby Ellis Island. A treasure of a museum over at Ellis walks visitors through the grueling process poor immigrants faced a century ago after they arrived on boats and tried to make their homes in a land of liberty. All the while, the rich passengers on the same steamships of the era were afforded free passage to America.