Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [29]
It’s the kind of place where you can picture that whole American Dream thing happening – people setting up in Pontiac and making successes of their lives in a modest, wholesome way. Those sitcoms of the fifties and sixties suddenly come alive when you’re in Pontiac; you realise they were based on real life. Then, in June 2009, the town’s local government did an amazing thing. It invited 160 artists to paint nineteen murals in the town in just four days. The council put up the artists, fed them and gave them booze, and the whole thing turned into a huge party. And, if you ask me, it was a huge success.
The murals were painted by a group of artists called Walldogs, which is what the commercial painters of old were often nicknamed. The group’s members came from all over the world, and their paintings aren’t anything like those ghastly murals that look half like graffiti and always give me the pip. These murals are handsome replicas of the advertisements that used to be painted on the sides of businesses at the turn of the twentieth century. They are very detailed figurative paintings, beautifully executed, and they make the town look smashing.
Residents of Pontiac stumbled on the idea of having their lovely town bedecked in murals after they had commissioned a Route 66 mural for the centre of the town. It was a simple image – the Route 66 highway shield – but it immediately drew visitors to the town. The nineteen murals painted in 2009 have been even more successful, doubling tourist numbers. I’m not surprised.
I went for a walk round Pontiac to have a good look at the murals. They were all a delight, but I was most tickled by the one for the Allen Candy Company. It appeared to have been painted by several artists (the signatures read: ‘Roy, Noah, Brad, Teddy and Jackie’), and apparently one of them had owned a dog that died the week before the mural was painted. So the artist had the dog cremated and mixed its ashes in with the paint. Now the dog is part of the mural. I loved that.
There’s more to Pontiac than the murals. They’ve also had funky wee cars inspired by Route 66 – each about the size of a kiddie’s pedal car – placed around the town. With the cars dotted all over the place and bolted to the ground, I had to watch my step, particularly on street corners. On the steps of the courthouse there’s a particularly weird car with a windswept Abraham Lincoln sitting in the back seat. Long before he became President, Lincoln had tried his first case as a lawyer in Pontiac. It was a strange thing to imagine as I strode around the town, dodging the wee cars and other artworks and admiring the murals.
Some of the cars were painted in rainbow colours. One, a wee beauty called ‘Pussy Footin’ around Downtown’, had a leopard-skin pattern. Another, with big sunglasses and a cheesy smile, was called ‘InCARgnito’. Then there was a brightly coloured van called ‘Vincent “I’m not a Van” Gogh’ that had a reproduction of one of Van Gogh’s paintings on it.
There are also pyramids and all sorts of nonsense, such as a pair of man-sized footprints in the concrete pavement next to a set of doggie paw-prints, so that it looks like some guy was just there, walking his dog. It’s terrific that a town will go to such lengths to cheer itself up. When you see so many towns falling into the abyss with pound shops and charity stores everywhere, it’s lovely to see one making the effort to tart itself up a bit.
Before I give the impression that Pontiac is a wee bit of heaven on earth, I ought to get something off my chest that bothered me right from the start of the trip. It’s not something unique to Pontiac, but by the time I reached the town it had become really hard to ignore. If this book inspires you