Geography Lesson for the Day

Nutsville is a town in West Virginia, not to be confused with Looneyville,
W.Va. Hell is in Michigan, and it's much more likely to freeze over than
Tranquility, in temperate Northern California.

Gladstone, a New York magazine photographer, traveled 38,000 miles across 40
states to photograph America's strangest in his new book, Passing Gas: And
Other Towns Along the American Highway Ten Speed Press.

Gladstone found Gas in Kansas while photographing Tightwad  a small
Missouri town that earned its name more than a century ago. Tightwads now
pride themselves on their hospitality.

But long ago, a local store owner accepted a deposit on merchandise that he
sold to another customer at a higher price. The first customer shouted,
Tightwad, and the incident lived on for years. It became the town joke, and
later, the town name.

An even bigger joke awaited Gladstone in Kansas, where café owner Bonnie
Steward welcomed him to drive over and photograph her home.

Come on down Route 59, Steward said. But don't blink your eye  or you just
might pass Gas.

Steward and other residents aren't sure how Gas got its name. There were
once two petroleum refining plants there.

Not all towns are familiar with their history.

The people of Ding Dong, Texas, don't know how they became Ding Dongs. And
they're not the only ones.

But even when towns can explain their strange name, it doesn't make it any
less strange.

Dull, Ohio, got its name form James Martin Dull, a grocer and local
politician. But make no mistake about it, local resident Billie Clark says,
Dull is dull.

But Dull is not Boring. Boring is in Oregon, where there is a Boring strip
joint, presumable filled with Boring strippers and other Boring people who
work even more Boring jobs.

Nothing is in Arizona. It's a one joke town with four residents. But it's a
thriving metropolis compared to Zero, Mont., which consists mainly of an
abandoned gas station.

Naming a town has torn apart some communities. The debates were so
contentious in one small town in Michigan that one resident shouted out,
You all can go to hell, and you can call this place Hell for all I care.

Thus, Hell, Mich., was born.

Hell Mayor Jim Rose runs the Devil's Den general store. He and his wife even
held out for a January wedding  to ride out the never ending stream of jokes.

I told all my friends it would be a cold day in hell when I got married, he
said.

A few towns were towns were clearly looking for a moneymaking gimmick.
Zilwaukee, a small town in northern Michigan, was named by the owners of a
local sawmill who hoped German immigrants would confuse it with Milwaukee,
settle there, and ease the labor shortage.

Give a small town a strange name, and you've put it on the map. But that's a
mixed blessing. Suckerville, Maine, undoubtedly sells more souvenir
T-shirts.

But what about the people of Rough and Ready, Pa., and its neighboring town,
Fearnot? According to an infamous newspaper headline from the 1930s:

Fearnot Man Marries Rough and Ready Woman

And some towns can't live up to their reputation. A resident of Nice,
Calif., was accused of being particularly nasty. Jay Leno once held up a
headline:

Nice Man Arrested for Beating Wife

But Gladstone, who's work has appeared in Life, says he's impressed by the
friendliness in these strangely named towns.

Obviously, if you live in a place like Purgatory, Maine, you're going to
hear a lot of jokes, maybe the same ones over and over again, he said.

But Purgatory's retired postmaster, Helen Allen, posed for Gladstone with a
devilish pitchfork.

I didn't have a lot of time in most of the towns. The people really warmed
up quickly and wanted to have fun, Gladstone said.

If you went around New York City with a camera, people would be saying,
How are you going to use this photo? I'll need my lawyer to look at the
release form. Are you scamming me?

After a while, people were saying to me, You're pretty nice for a fellow
from N-Y-C.

Some other geography lessons from Passing Gas:

Lessons in Intercourse: Most Americans probably didn't know they had a
Climax in New York. There are actually 14 cities across the country named
Climax. You'll find Intercourse in another seven states.

Needless to say, whether you're talking about Intercourse, Ala., or
Intercourse, Pa., don't expect wild promiscuity.

Still, the local sewing circle in Intercourse, Ala., had to change its names
after a series of car crashes outside the town's meeting hall, where it
advertised, "Intercourse Lessons Wednesday Night."

Sweetlips and Sadness: Some towns are history lessons. Sweetlips, Tenn., is
where Civil War soldiers stopped to get water and Stinking Point, Va., was
where dead bodies washed up on shore.

Bad Advertising: Are you itching to move to Scratch Ankle, Ala., named when
church people in passing carriages noted the plethora of mosquitoes?

Similarly, Fleatown, Ohio, was once a stagecoach stop and the home of a
prominent farm. Not necessarily a good mix.

You're Full of Crapo: Giggle all you want, residents of Crapo, Md., will
tell you that their town is pronounced Cray-po, and that's a family name.
One must assume that this is an ongoing problem.

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