(male announcer) Production funding for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations has been provided by: (female announcer) YRC Worldwide and public TV are natural partners.

We share the very important goal of connecting people, places, and information.

In this big world, that's a big job.

YRC Worldwide and public TV can handle it.

YRC Worldwide: honored to support the communities we serve.

(male announcer) The DeBruce Companies, proud to serve agricultural communities throughout the Midwest with high-speed grain-handling facilities, fertilizer, and feed ingredient distribution terminals.

(male announcer) And by Fred & Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of KCPT and public television, urging you to become a member today.

(man) ♪ Welcome to a show about things you can see ♪ ♪ without going far, and a lot of them are free.

♪ ♪ If you thought there was nothing ♪ ♪ in the old heartland, ♪ ♪ you ought to hit the blacktop ♪ ♪ with these fools in a van.

♪ ♪ Look out; they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Randy does the steering so he won't hurl.

♪ ♪ Mike's got the map, such a man of the world.

♪ ♪ That's Don with the camera, ♪ ♪ kind of heavy on his shoulder.

♪ ♪ And that giant ball of tape, it's a world record holder.

♪ ♪ Look out; they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Look out; they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard.

♪ (Don) Dear TV Mailbag, where have all the munchkins gone?

Hi, Don the camera guy here, looking to locate a local legend and having little luck.

We're trying to find a very small house where some of those wee actors from The Wizard of Oz reportedly live.

McMansions, yes, but that munchkin house has gone with the wind.

Okay, so we didn't find it so far.

(Don) Scenery aside, it's a pretty lame way to start a show, but we aren't done in La Jolla yet, "we" being these two producers with me and the world's largest ball of videotape bringing up the rear.

(Randy) You da man.

(Mike) You da man.

(Don) Bringing it up to another so-called mystery spot: a gravity hill where the laws of nature do not appear to apply.

(Mike) Line up your right rear tire with the telephone pole on the side of the street with the fairway.

So now I'm gonna go in neutral and roll uphill.

Right.

Neutral, just like Switzerland.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're doing it.

(Mike) It's the science part of our show.

(Randy) Whee-ha.

Yeah.

Yeah, whoo.

(Don) Sure, it's only a cheap illusion, and you can't even see it that well, but this isn't National Geo.

We take our victories where we can find them, and this is a first.

And speaking of firsts, I'm told that one awaits in nearby Ocean Beach.

We have, of course, on numerous occasions, ogled outsider art in some very nice places, and Mike did stop once for a barbershop do.

But never before have we seen a place where both could be done together, until now.

(Lynne) We discovered this art in a little antique store up the street from here while looking for a garden set.

We were walking out the door, and I happened to look up and see what looked like a little kid painting, and I said, "Hmm, that's interesting."

It was by was by Annie Tolliver.

And then the fever started.

We called Maarten Parmentiere, who had her few things at that antique store, and she started coming down and showing us what she had, and we were starting to get a revelation that this was something that not everybody knew about, that wasn't exposed to, and we'd found something really unique and wonderful.

We've now been in business a little over eight years, and we've gotten to meet probably about half the artists in our stable.

We entertained all of the House of Blues artists who were in town painting the interior of the San Diego House of Blues.

They showed my husband a few tricks.

They showed him about making frames and about beadwork, and he did all the frames on these mirrors recently.

He also did that bottlecapped archway there.

(Randy) Very Mr.

I.

(Lynne) He is very--he loves Mr.

I.

(Randy) Does it ever bring business in off the street for haircuts because they see the art?

Is there any-- (Lynne) Do you know what?

I've never really done an in-depth study of that.

I think that people's eyes are caught when they walk by and look in.

I don't know if that makes them or prompts them to walk in and get a haircut.

I think in some cases, it probably does.

There's not a whole lot of this selling out here, sadly.

The crux of it we sell to the East Coast.

We sell Purvis Young to people in Miami.

We sell Lamar Sorrento to people in Memphis... (Randy) I just love it.

(Lynne) Because... (Randy and Mike) We love it.

People see it and love it.

When they come to our home, they're, like, "Wow, what is this stuff?"

you know, but they're not brazen enough to put it in their own homes yet.

They just... (Don) Now, as B words go, "brazen" is one we can embrace, so I'm taking John and Yoko home, and the big ball's come in to soak up some primitive cool.

What more could we ask for except, perhaps, a leisurely lunch, as we blow by San Diego on our way to the desert?

In fact, the next destination has desert in its name.

A genuine roadside attraction from days of yore perched high on the hill just north of the border.

(Ben) The guy who built this, his name is Bert Vaughn, and he was sort of a big wheeler-dealer.

He had come from, I guess, the East Coast in 1915.

He actually had heard that Jacumba-- which is the next little town up here-- was gonna get a border crossing, so he bought the entire town.

Coming up through here, before 1965, even, a lot of people remember you had to stop three or four times to cool your car down for 1/2 hour.

And so at the top here, you had a, you know, captive audience, so he had a bar on the road, and he had campgrounds and some cabins and stuff like that, but this was just an ad for a bar, a very grand ad for a bar.

On this corridor between, say, San Diego and Phoenix, there were probably 12 really wonderful places like this with rattlesnake shows and that kind of stuff.

I'm the last one that's still standing and working.

(Randy) The walls on this thing are a mile thick.

This thing's really built.

(Ben) These are not skilled people who were doing this.

They basically just piled up rock, put cement on it, and then walked around, did another six inches of rock and put cement on it.

But considering how thick it is and its cylindrical shape, it's very stable.

When they blasted the new freeway through, they used a tremendous amount of dynamite, and the tower would actually rock, but it never cracked or had any problem with it, so...

This is fun.

(Randy) Those animals and stuff are not Bert Vaughn's, right?

(Ben) In 1933, a guy out of work during the Depression named Earl Ratcliffe, who was an engineer-- he was a young guy out of work-- somehow ended up meeting Bert Vaughn, and he had carved some other rocks out here sort of on his own, but Bert hired him for a year to carve the animals in the cave all by hand.

So he would just look at a piece of rock and say, "What does that say to me?"

and then start chipping until it came out.

He was certainly not a pro, but he's certainly left one of the great folk art things left from that era.

I think it's only in the past few years that people have looked at any of this and saw any value to it at all.

And in the past 20 years or so, I think a lot of people are going, "Wait a minute.

Let's preserve some of this," and, "There is some value to this landscape," but... (Randy) Obviously, you saw that earlier than they did.

(Ben) Yeah, yeah, I guess.

(Randy) Are you just, you know, a forward-thinking visionary guy?

Well, I don't know; I just love it.

I think there's a certain kind of brain that this responds to.

I think, you know, a big forest, when the trees are in the way of the view, and you can't really see much is not as interesting to me as where you can see the bones of the land here.

You can really tell what's going on here and where you're going.

I intend to die out on that rock pile over there somehow and let the ravens have their way.

I've been eating plenty of animals in my life.

They should get their innings, don't you think?

(Don) As an herbivore myself, that sounds like fair play, but here's the real question for Ben: what's with the hat?

I'm a bald person.

I need the headgear.

I get cold.

(Don) Actually, we were kind of digging the Kim Jong Il look, but most of all, we are feeling the power of the tower and its gift shop.

Yes, art and archeology are all well and good, but superior souvenir shopping always seals the deal.

That's what I was looking for.

(Don) With generous support from viewers like you, no one leaves the Desert View disappointed today.

Salvation Mountain, here we come.

As to last night's accommodations , one school of thought holds that if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

So I say let's talk about that weather.

It's already getting warm out here in the Imperial Valley.

This tiny town is Niland, which, as the sign says, is mere miles away from one of the granddaddies of them all in the world of grassroots art: Leonard Knight Salvation Mountain, rising up since 1994 in a colorful mix of hay and clay and high-gloss paint, more of which we've brought along to help further Leonard's cause.

That's Don.

Hi.

Hi.

How are you?

In 1967, my sister made me go to church, and I was about 30 years old, and I didn't like it, and I was running away from her.

I starting saying by myself, "Jesus, I'm a sinner.

Please come into my heart."

And it's amazing.

God Almighty really zapped me that morning.

It's been over 45 years now, and I want the whole world to know-- just one scripture I'll give you: Acts 2:38.

The Bible says the only way to get saved is repent to Jesus Christ.

The first eight years here, all I had was a bicycle, and I'd go to the dump and pick up paint cans and little old paint.

And then, a while back, I had paint this thick, and I estimate 100,000 gallons of paint now.

And paint comes in pretty fast, as you can tell.

Looks can be deceiving.

I used to be young and do a lot better, but I coast along, and I got 25 more years to go, so I want to take time to smell the roses and have a good time.

And I'd love to show you inside of this ten-year-old monument that I made out of 80 or 90 bales of hay.

Anyway, it's all made out of window putty and broken glass.

(Randy) So were you always a guy who worked on these kinds of things?

I mean, you didn't have a desk job somewhere.

You drove a hay truck-- (Leonard) No, I had some of the-- I shoveled snow on top of IBM building in the wintertime in Vermont, and I changed 18-wheel truck tires on the highway.

And I had about 15 jobs that makes me happy to be here.

[laughs] I got 5,000 bales of hay in this thing, but before I show you, I'd like to-- The Folk Art Society of America five or six years ago tried to turn it into a national monument, and it's so complicated, I can't figure it out, but I just know they seem to love me back there.

It's the most amazing thing, 'cause they got no reason to love me, but they love me anyway, because I think God's on the move.

This my handmade car tire tree with a wheelbarrow.

I made that tree to hold it up, and I find all the sticks out in the desert and the trees out in the desert, and the whole mountain gives me the clay, so when I have 1/2 a gallon of clay, I throw it, and I hit it with my fist, and I got a flower.

And I've been poking flowers all over the place.

(Randy) You and the mountain are kind of like working together here?

(Leonard) Oh, we're working so close together.

Every time we don't work together, I tell God, "I wish you'd help me more."

[laughs] See that window?

(Randy) I do.

(Leonard) And it's the same size as a bale of hay.

So when I go out to my hardware store out in the desert, I get car windows and put in a bale of hay, and everything's customized.

You might just as well get stuff that fits.

(Randy) I like how you refer to that as your hardware store out in the desert.

(Leonard) Isn't that something?

[laughs] Everything is convenient right here.

And the best thing here is that--what I like is, if somebody gave me $40 million to live in a big, high, fancy place, I'd have to think it over-- 40 years.

I'd say, "Nah, I don't think I want that," 'cause I just seem to be happy right here.

It will be ready to use in a couple of days.

And when it's wet, all you do is just take your fist and hit it, and you've got a flower, so making flowers is kind of the fun part.

So you can put 40 flowers a day on it if you just keep a-pounding them out.

Boy, this is the most gabbing I've done in a long time.

This is what I call the yellow brick road.

Yeah, the yellow brick road isn't really from the Bible, per se, right?

No, I think that's in the movies.

You know what I mean, probably.

I do; I love The Wizard of Oz.

[laughs] And I like your road.

That's a pretty good little climb.

And you can see the ocean and the blue better and the boat in the waves.

(Randy) Oh, you can, can't you?

(Mike) And the hearts are pretty.

(Leonard) And the big hearts are pretty.

(Mike) And I love all the little detail work around the edge, like those little tree branches and stuff.

(Leonard) And that big last wave out there.

See the white waves?

(Randy) The whitecap on that wave.

(Leonard) Yeah, the whitecaps.

Probably 50 wheelbarrow fulls of adobe in each ocean there to make it look like a wave.

(Randy) How many gallons of paint?

(Leonard) 100,000 gallons or more.

(Randy) Do you sit up here at night sometimes and think, "Wow, I've done all this.

This is amazing."

(Leonard) No, I sit up here some nights, and I think, "Lord, you and I done this, "and you picked the smallest person in the whole country to do it, and thank you."

[laughs] I don't push Jesus at all on anybody, because people started to push me years ago, and I didn't like it, so I let my mountain do my pushing, and it's been pushing good lately.

Like they pray through-- books say that: Leonard lets his mountain do his talkin', and it's talkin' good.

[laughs] (Don) As if this weren't art enough, Leonard also dabbles on the musical side.

♪ There's a flower tree by our home.

♪ (Don) And later today, he's scheduled to act in a movie, a big-budget Hollywood film that's being shot just down the way in a place they call Slab City.

But that's another story altogether, and we don't have time, because-- and I am not making this up-- we are rolling to the sea, the Salton Sea, that is: an inadvertent body of water formed by a small channel-cutting error.

Over the years, toxic runoff from the valley's fertilized fields has left the fish gasping and driven down the demand for beachfront lots.

We wanted to say we saw it, which we have, smelled it too, and now we can resume the driving portion of this show, driving through more desert, past some seriously large dunes, and emerging further east in Felicity at what purports to be the center of the world, though, strangely enough, it's closed for the season.

But nothing says we can't grab the gloves and play some quick catch.

(Mike) This place is all about the French, isn't it, Randy?

(Randy) It is.

I think Jacque had something to do with it.

He's not here.

We, apparently, not important enough to get the center of the world opened back up.

(Don) Do you ever shag flies?

(Randy) Oh , I love to shag flies.

How about French flies?

(Don) Hey, Mike.

(Mike) Yeah.

(Don) I'm gonna put a little Grey Poupon on this one.

See if you can catch it.

No foreign substances allowed on the ball.

(Randy) You know, from here, I'm getting a lot of stares.

♪ If the nightingale could pitch like you... ♪ Well, at least we aren't having to put up with a lot of pesky cars parked here.

(Mike) That's true, a lot of them Renaults.

Uh, whoa.

(Don) Whoa, Willie Mays.

(Randy) Willie Mays.

(Don) He was French, wasn't he?

(Randy) Dick Butkus, he was French.

(Don) Okay, so facts are not our forte, but here at the center of the world, I do have a prediction.

Tomorrow we'll wake up in a whole new state.

(Mike) Well, there doesn't seem to be any French resistance to us playing here today.

[laughter] Uh-oh, caught me grooming, getting ready for church on the Arizona side of the line.

Not so much to attend it, of course, as to verify that it's as tiny as it claims.

(Randy) It's pretty small.

I'm starting to think it's actually a contender.

(Don) Yup, this one's barely bigger than the TV weasel's head, and inside, the chapel's neat and tidy, paneled and pewed.

But lacking AC, it must get hotter than you-know-what.

Sure, we've seen smaller, but at least we found it, unlike its more belligerent neighbor over at the Yuma Proving Grounds.

I'm talking about a genuine atomic cannon, or so a tipster tells us.

Yet there are no signs and no proof.

But what do we know about nuke-lobbing guns anyway, other than they were a bad idea from the get-go?

So we are going on to something less hostile: the Space Age Lodge in Gila Bend, bright and shiny and calling out the traveling family since it opened its doors back in the '60s.

(Duke) It's a kick.

They started with something here 40 years go.

Then Best Western came and said, "We don't want you to get rid of the image.

We want you to enhance it."

Well, the Space Age is almost a state landmark.

The man that did this, when I told him I wanted what I wanted for the lobby, and I wanted this, he says, "We can't do it."

I said, "I don't want to hear you can't do it."

It's 28 foot in diameter outside.

It's 28 foot from here to the top.

You see the mirror there?

That guy's really right up there behind you.

(Randy) Would you say Roswell's kind of sneaking in?

(Duke) No, Roswell, New Mexico's a joke, and this is not a joke.

All the murals we have and everything else here-- not murals, but the pictures-- actually came from NASA.

They call me up whenever they have one of these things, and they want to know if we were interested.

I don't know where I am on the list, but we get these calls.

It's a lot of fun, 'cause people come by, and believe it or not, they even bring their child.

And they say, "Johnny, when I was your age, "we stayed right here.

"By the way, is room 101 open?

Because that's the room we were in," and they do it all over again.

(Don) Well, now, a Space Age nap sounds mighty appealing, but I suspect it's not in my foreseeable future.

(Randy) Gamma rays, yeah.

(Don) After a ceremonial T-shirt exchange, with these very cool mugs thrown in to boot and a gentle correction from Duke... No.

Gila Bend?

Oh, don't ever say Gila Bend.

They'll know you're not from here.

It's just like the Gila monster.

(Don) It's back to the backseat bound for the big city but passing Phoenix for now and scooting toward Scottsdale instead.

Sad to say, we're a few months too late to meet Mr. Louis Lee, whose love of rocks led to making all this in his yard.

(Randy) Damn, this is neat.

(Don) Though Mrs. Lee was not so impressed.

The garden's long-term prognosis is uncertain.

But as for us, we still have places to go and strange things to see: large metal figures with names like Toaster Boy and Trailer Trash Man, and yes, apparently, flames will be flying in this corner lot.

(Randy) If we, in a nutshell, explain what we're here for, what are we here for?

Well, this is all recycled high-tech art.

I take apart things from society, industry, and put them back together in ways they weren't made to be.

The frame of this is actually a dip tank for chrome plating, and this was from a water softener.

[recorded dog barking] [Richard laughs] Sometimes things will lay around for years or months, and then all of a sudden, it all clicks, and it's like, "Okay, that's how it's gonna go together," or I assemble parts of something until I find the rest to make something look right.

If I had time, I was gonna go get some lamp oil, and I have a flaming leash to go between the two.

(Randy) A keg on top?

(Richard) Yeah, that was a Pabst Blue Ribbon keg of beer.

See, we own an old trailer park, and everybody wanted to bulldoze under all the parts.

from the trailer park, so these are all the junction boxes that trailers would plug into for electric, and the bodies, the pressure tank from the well hhouse.

The original gas valves from him came from machines that make semiconductors, and a friend went ahead and remanufactured all those for me.

I started out building metal rockets when I was a kid and liked fire and things going up, and then I discovered a group called Survival Research Laboratories.

It's the oldest group in the country doing things like this.

(Randy) Art training being part of your background?

(Richard) No, none.

None whatsoever, and I didn't graduate-- I never got my degree in electronics either, but...

Turn on the keyboard, Harry.

(Randy) So you've learned what the sort of, you know, strategies have to be as you go?

(Richard) Well, I engineer on the fly, but I got a basic idea of what I'm gonna do before I start.

I make the drawings when I'm finished.

[laughs] [fire whooshing] There we go.

(Randy) Looks like you could get hurt here pretty good to me.

(Richard) Well, actually, the fire department said this is safer than he's seen a lot of barbecues in apartment complexes and stuff.

They consider it a home appliance.

[laughs] (Harry) My vision for Richard is to help him, you know, build this up and get a computer interface to it and sequence it for events, you know, make it a real integrated, orchestrated performance.

I make a little go a long way, if you didn't notice.

[laughs] This already got me a job of being an art director on a short movie, because this guy saw me come up to a few events.

I didn't know who he was, and then he asked-- he told me that, "You've got all the skills to be an art director or production designer in movies."

(Randy) And that was just more than it takes to be a producer, actually, so... (Richard) Yeah.

(Don) No argument here, but once again, they've weaseled some free food.

However, no one thought to bring tofu dogs, and s'mores are not recommended while using TV equipment.

Guess I'll just tickle the ivories and shoot some fire.

This is Don the camera guy signing off.

(female announcer) To learn more about the sights on this show and how to find them, visit us on the web at: DVDs, tapes, and a companion book to this series are available by calling: Captioning byCaptionMax www.captionmax.com (Mike) En garde.

You're fine; don't get up.

(Don) Boy, you're pretty nimble.

(Randy) She is.

(Don) Man, she's like a goat.

(Randy) My knees are hurting just watching that.

[light piano music] ♪ ♪ (Randy) No w, to your right is Salvation Mountain.

It's the handiwork of Leonard Knight, an amazing individual who wants everyone to know that God is love.

(male announcer) Production funding for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations has been provided by: (female announcer) YRC Worldwide and public TV are natural partners.

We share the very important goal of connecting people, places, and information.

In this big world, that's a big job.

YRC Worldwide and public TV can handle it.

YRC Worldwide: honored to support the communities we serve.

(male announcer) The DeBruce Companies, proud to serve agricultural communities throughout the Midwest with high-speed grain-handling facilities, fertilizer, and feed ingredient distribution terminals.

(male announcer) And by Fred & Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of KCPT and public television, urging you to become a member today.