Another quote from the very conservative folks at Hamilton Farms posted proudly on I-5.
"At the end of the war, if we lose our freedoms have we won or lost?"
Perhaps the non-Washington readers need a little background on the sign.
Home-front Journal
Freeway billboard barbs a sign of what free speech really means
By Ron Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist
Editor's note: Columnist Ron Judd and photographer Harley Soltes are traveling Washington state to explore life — and life interrupted — in uncertain times.
CHEHALIS — Just as they've been for more than three decades, the letters on the billboard are neat, square and perfectly spaced.
IF YOU WON'T SUPPORT THE TEAM, GET OUT OF OUR STADIUM.
This wording is subtle, the message crystal clear: Support the troops, or get lost.
But the larger principle is free speech, and that's where things get a little messy.
Take it from the Hamilton family of Chehalis, which has cajoled, enlightened, insulted, amused and, frankly, outraged entire generations of Americans traveling the straight, boring Interstate 5 corridor between Portland and Seattle.
It probably doesn't dawn on many of the freeway commuters that the infamous roadside Uncle Sam sign is the very kind of liberty the United States says it's fighting to unleash in Iraq. But there it is, staring us in the SUV grill: All-caps freedom to say what you want, without reprisal. It's taken for granted in America, where anyone with five minutes, a telephone line and an opinion can offer his or her own Internet or talk-radio treatise on war, death, taxes or the outrageously high price of dumping a sofa at the local transfer station.
Here between Chehalis and Centralia, Al Hamilton, the original erector of the Uncle Sam sign, has a word for all of those folks: latecomers.
A lifetime resident and local farmer, Hamilton has been subliminally implanting his own analysis of U.S. social and political events in the brains of drivers for about 35 years, typically with a sharp, conservative — often acid — tongue.
Over the years, this largely invisible author has spoken to us in ways like this:
BOOTH GARDNER: A MAN WHO THINKS TWICE BEFORE HE SAYS NOTHING.
Or this:
GOVERNORS LIKE LOWRY DON'T GROW ON TREES. THEY SWING FROM THEM.
Or this week's less-inspired, southbound message:
DOES LOCKE SUPPORT ALL DRUNK DRIVERS?
The Hamilton sign had particularly harsh words for Bill and Hillary Clinton. And it's no surprise that the first slogan inspired by the war in Iraq brayed support for U.S. troops.
Around here, the billboard is such a part of the scenery that locals don't react that strongly to it either way. The liberals on the I-5 commute may have been hoping the message board would someday fade away with its aging messenger.
Hamilton, 83, standing in a downpour alongside his creation this week, concedes he's grown too old to take on the world. But the pen, as it were, already has been passed. Not only to the next generation, in the form of his daughter, Pat Wilson, but the one after that, in the person of Wilson's son, Todd, 24.
The guiding principle of the sign will remain what it has always been: "Just to make people think," insists Pat Wilson, a substitute school teacher and, along with husband Doug, a full-time farmer. "People should know that there IS somebody on the other side."
The other side of what?
"Well, like now," she says. "They have all those people out there demonstrating. But there's a lot of us out here who do support what's going on."
When the family agrees on a slogan, Todd, a handlebar-mustachioed man starting his own excavating company, does the actual placement on the billboard, which is accessed by a tall ladder propped in the back of his pickup.
"Lots of people honk (in support) when he's up there changing it," Pat says.
"Lots of people give me the finger, too," Todd interjects.
But standing your ground in the face of abuse has become family tradition. Todd follows in the footsteps of a grandfather with a deep-seated distrust of government regulation. When I-5 was plotted to run through the Centralia-Chehalis area in the 1950s, it cut right through the center of Hamilton's family farm.
After losing the battle to keep his land whole, Hamilton shifted gears and found a way to profit from it, selling billboard space along the freeway. Then along came President Lyndon Johnson and his do-gooder wife, Lady Bird, who set about to rid the nation's interstates of unsightly signs.
Around the same time the government was telling Hamilton to bring down the billboards, his own wife, Ruth, read that, for the first time, the state was spending more money on welfare than education, Pat Wilson says. That fact became the subject of the first-ever Hamilton billboard barb.
The rest is block-letter history.
Several legal attempts, all unsuccessful, have tried to rid the freeway of the sign, which now sits in its third location, near the Rib-Eye Restaurant outside Chehalis. State courts have ruled it is legal use of private land.
Others irked by the roadside banter have taken matters into their own hands, firing bullets or paintballs at the billboard, or trying to light its support piling on fire. One time, vandals simply rearranged the letters to read: WE NEED A YAK FOR LUNCH.
Nobody said unfettered expression would be trouble-free. Or even polite. Consider this from the billboard archives: AIDS TURNS FRUITS INTO VEGETABLES.
Some would argue, in fact, that one problem with free speech is that it attracts too many self-appointed free-speakers. Indeed, some here lump the billboard folks in with a couple other notable eccentrics.
Like Dominic Gospodor, 79, a wealthy retired Seattleite who has erected, on a roadside property along I-5 just a few miles south, a set of massive, surreal steel monuments to Jesus Christ, Chief Seattle, Mother Teresa and victims of the Holocaust. Gospodor knows that at night, the lighted monuments are so eye-catching, they can stop traffic.
"It's an ideal location," he says. "Lots of exposure."
He promises more monuments soon, including one to victims of drunken drivers.
"You kill 3,000 people on 9/11 in New York, and we haven't gotten over it," he says. "We kill 17,000 a year on our highways, and nobody gives a damn."
On a smaller scale but with equal passion, there's a guy who drives around Centralia with a pickup-bed sign trashing a local attorney who supposedly wronged him.
"It's just like, there goes that crazy guy again," says lifetime resident Connie Mullins, 49.
Mullins says the town she grew up in has an infamous history of free speech — and of the rights, responsibilities and occasional mortal danger that come with it.
From the window of a downtown antique store where she works, she can look into the historic town square at the statue of The Sentinel, a stone figure honoring four local Legionnaires killed during the infamous "Centralia Massacre," a bloody confrontation with leftist Wobblies that left five people dead after a parade on Armistice Day 1919.
Directly over her head, on the outside of her building, a more recent artwork has been added: A colorful, in-your-face mural depicting lynched Wobbly organizer Nathan Wesley Everest, breaking his chains and rising from the flaming depths of the earth to resume the battle against corporate America — the latter depicted as plump, polluting pigs.
Pretty powerful imagery for a conservative town of 12,000, decked out these days with yellow ribbons and American flags.
"There are a few people who've said it was offensive," Mullins says.
But she chooses to look at it the same way she views the Uncle Sam sign, even on those days when the message makes her wince: "Well, that's his opinion."
One of a million small-town voices in a big nation at war, weighing, perhaps more than ever, the right to say something against the way it will be heard.
"That's America," Mullins says. "It's what we're all about." |
