Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Tourist Cabins on North US 41.
Before I ever met Jim Huntley, I had noticed the sign north of North Terre Haute that said Huntley's Cabins in front of the house that is pictured at top. Even then, in about 1954, Tourist's Cabins were out; Motel's were in. The Huntley family simply unplugged the electric sign and allowed the cabins to rot in place. What started as shade trees for the cabins has become a thick growth of trees. I don't know if the remnants of the Tourist Cabins have been cleared away but there is a chain link fence around the area where they once sat.
Jim was only about 3 years older than me but I thought of him as older. Everyone did. He wore a goatee, had a paunch and no hair on the top of his head... all this at age 22. I saw him socially (we would have laughed at that definition but I'm just saying we didn't work or study or do anything productive except to coexist as observers of the community) - saw him almost every day for about 10 years and enjoyed it. When I heard that he died, I had only seen him 3 or 4 times in 30 years but I felt like I lost a friend to a stupid accident with a broken microwave.
An activist, an artist, a folk singer, a handyman, a mechanic, a painter and a former Boy Scout, he held art department positions at the university and at the city's first TV station then exemplified free lance: - artist, sign painter, car mechanic. His life defied summarization. He left his artistic tracks all over the city; his name will come up again.
