Greetings From America's Secret Capitals

By STEVE LOPEZ

It's happened to all of you. You're in the car, headed who knows where, and you come to this town that isn't happy being just another place, because what does that mean today? It means you've got a Dunkin' Donuts and a Taco Bell, like every other place in America. Big deal.

A town needs an identity, or it doesn't exist. Something nobody else can claim.

Welcome to the Carpet Capital of the World!

Yeah, so it's just rugs. But now they're on the map.

And don't say you haven't stumbled upon one of those places in the minivan, children strapped in behind you in those church pews--or maybe in a roadster, top down, the wind laughing through the sparse seedlings of your new plug-a-rug--and wondered how a nowhere burg like Dalton, Ga., comes to carpet the planet. Or how a look-fast town, a highway blur, becomes the Garlic Capital (Gilroy, Calif.) or the Storm-Watching Capital (Bandon, Ore.) of the universe (or so they claim).

And what's it like to live, work and play in one of those dozens of places that dress up billboards, fly flags and erect monuments and museums to a product or an idea? You've come to the right place, because we have all the answers, centered, as we are, in the news and information capital of the world. We have sat on porches and in parlors, toured factories and roamed Main Streets. We will now take you to the fireworks capital of the entire galaxy--or at least of Pennsylvania--and whisk you into the clouds to meet the too-young millionaires in sandals and cutoffs who populate the top of a Dallas skyscraper (bloody video-game capital of the world).

As different as these worlds are, they are a part of the same thing. The secret capitals of America.

The making and remaking of identities. Enterprise. Pride. Work. Survival.

America.

Get off Route 431 in northern Alabama, drive into the center square in the little town of Albertville, and you'll know the full passion of American industriousness and hometown pride. There, perched nobly atop a sleek granite platform and gleaming under a stubborn sun that hogs the sky, is a nickel-plated fire hydrant.

Albertville is the fire-hydrant capital of the world. What, you thought they just sprouted out of the ground? Somebody has to make them, and in Albertville (pop. 17,145) even dogs know what puts food in the bowl. They leave the town monument alone, despite the urge.

When the whistle blows at 3 o'clock in the hydrant factory, a redhead named Opie races away in a pickup and begins a second back-breaking job to help pay for the dream house he is building on seven lakeside acres of peace and quiet.

In Pittsburgh, Pa., a wild-haired doctor finishes a round of surgeries before noon, gets into a Mercedes and then motors an hour north to help his 73-year-old father mix chemicals and explosives in the fireworks capital of the world.

This is a story of ingenuity big and small, noble and flat out cash driven. It all began, for sure, at the very foundation of American capitalism. The lemonade stand.

Who among us, in our childhoods, didn't see some kid selling lemonade on a corner and plot to steal a piece of the action with a better drink, a nicer stand, a smarter gimmick?

In some respects this is a story of grownup lemonade stands.

Of the will to work.

Of success waiting to happen.

Of ideas too early, too late and right on the money.

A SHRINE TO THE RV

I was built for comfort; I ain't built for speed. But I got everything a good man need. WILLIE DIXON

If we were smarter, Elkhart, Ind. (pop. 43,627), would have been our first stop on the Summer of '98 Secret Capitals Tour. Why? Because we could have bought a motor home the size of Graceland and then cruised in prefab splendor, instead of staring moose-eyed at flight-delayed lights in airports across the land. We could have taken a band along too--Elkhart is also the band-instrument capital of the world--and turned this thing into a national polka fest.

The question we carried into each of these capital cities was this: What effect does the celebrated industry have on local life, culture, business? In Elkhart, the answer can be packed into one little factoid.

They have an RV museum and Hall of Fame (T shirts $12).

But don't laugh at Elkhart. Fifty-two percent of the area's 156,000-member work force is employed in RV-related industry, and roughly half the $10 billion worth of recreational vehicles produced nationally come from this area. You'd build a shrine too.

So maybe the hall--technically it's the RV/Manufactured Housing Museum, Hall of Fame and Library--doesn't have the appeal of Cooperstown, N.Y. But the lines are shorter. The day we pulled up, in fact, there was nobody in the place but caretaker Al Hesselbart, so we got a personal tour of RVs that date all the way back to 1913.

For a long stretch of time, there was virtually no design difference between the RV and a kitchen appliance. Remember those silver boxes lumbering down the highway like two-slice toasters? They've got them here. They also have a little Ralph Kramden affair, from 1964, called the Coachmen Cadet. We mention this because the Coachmen story is the lemonade stand all over again, which is why founder Tom Corson's photo is one of the 185 black-and-white mugs hanging in the RV Hall of Fame.

The story goes like this:

Way back in 1933, an Elkharter (Elkhartian? Elkhartonian?) named Wilbur Schult goes to the World's Fair and sees Ray Gilkison of Terre Haute with a homemade trailer and figures he can top it. So he starts a business, drawing other copycats and a support industry. Then in 1962 along comes Corson, who gets a job on an RV assembly line, moves into sales and then calls brothers Claude and Keith. Guess what? he says. We can do better.

The three Coachmen started in a two-car garage in 1962 and made 12 trailers the first year. Last year Coachmen, the largest among 72 RV manufacturers in Indiana and one of the top three nationally, sold 28,000 RVs for $661 million. "It was the best year ever, and the numbers are up for this year," says president Keith Corson.

They're up industry-wide, 11.6% in the first quarter, to their highest level in 20 years. People want bigger and better RVs, says Corson, who sells everything from a $3,500 folding trailer to a $160,000 motor home the size of the Love Boat. They want AC, microwave, satellite dishes, PC stations, hydraulic slide-outs to expand room size when parked. If Coachmen could figure out how to make one with a back lawn, some Joe's going to buy the damn thing and mow it while Ethel does 65 on the interstate.

"We're an economic indicator," says CEO Claire Skinner. "RV sales go up before the economy improves and come down before it falls off. Sales are up."

So what does it all mean? It means fresh paint on houses and new cars in driveways across Elkhart County. It means $15 an hour plus benefits, on average, for assembly-line work that ranges from welding chassis to hanging kitchen curtains. It means six and seven members of the same family with RV jobs. It means that if you see an Amishman in a buggy horsing along State Route 13 in Middlebury, he may be going to his job at an RV factory. How can you not love a country in which the Plain People are fitting $100,000 motorized dens with BarcaLoungers, satellite dishes and microwaves?

Nobody's got a better deal than Ken Slaven. Every day, eight of the Class A motor homes--the big ones--roll off a Coachmen assembly line manned by 185 workers who grunt, lift and sweat. And then Slaven, 50, sticks the keys in the ignition and takes each one for a road test.

"Lights, wipers, pressure gauges, shakes, rattles. I check everything," he says as we head out on his 20-mile course in a $72,000 Catalina with a queen-size bed and a factory-fresh scent. Slaven came in three years ago, after 20 years as national sales manager for Sears. He gave up $16,000 a year but spends more time with his wife. "I'd have to say it's just about the best job in the place."

We bus past a sign that says MIDDLEBURY, INDIANA, HOME OF THE 1995 JUNIOR MISS. We turn left on Route 120, headed for the open road under a canopy of oaks. The whole slab is ours, Seattle to Savannah. All its parks, all its hills and valleys, all its roadside hash houses. Who says we ever have to turn back?

"Hey Ken, does this seat swivel?" I ask.

"Yeah. Just pull that lever," he says.

I try it. It doesn't work. Slaven grabs his clipboard and makes a notation.

Even I could get a job here.

WE'LL ALWAYS NEED HYDRANTS

Make yourself necessary to somebody. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Albertville-Boaz (Ala.) Reporter story appeared on April 10, 1990. A day that will not soon be forgotten in these parts. The story began like this:

"The public is invited to ceremonies in downtown Albertville Wednesday, April 11, at 1:30 to dedicate one of the world's most unique statues."

Governor Guy Hunt was there. Miss Alabama too. They assembled, with other dignitaries, in the center of the downtown area. When the signal was given, a cover was pulled back. And there it was.

A monument to the one-millionth fire hydrant produced by the Mueller Co., which makes nearly half the national supply.

"I want to show you the photo album," says Peggy Fleckenstein, Mueller's personnel manager. "This here is the luncheon we had." On the buffet is an ice sculpture of a hydrant. "And look at this. We had the employees assemble in a fire-hydrant formation out front of the building. Can you see it?"

Small-town America never changes. The towns might look a little different, downtown character snuffed out by those hideous superstores on the edge of town everywhere. But the people are the same.

"Right now we're out of bumper stickers," says Chamber of Commerce president Anne Sweitzer, whose office is a museum of spiritual quotations, such as this gem: THE HEART NEVER RESTETH TILL IT FINDETH REST IN THEE. "But we're very proud to be the fire-hydrant capital of the world."

Lloyd Darnell says Mueller moved to Albertville in 1975 because operating costs were too high in California. It makes 500 fire hydrants a day, in an array of colors, and when stacked on pallets for delivery, the bonnets of the hydrants look like the tops of Sno-Kones. Houston orders them light blue with white trim. Indianapolis, Ind., likes them aquamarine.

"We're pretty much tied to housing starts," says Darnell. Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in America, is a big customer. "Someone might run over one now and then, but other than that, they don't wear out. With new subdivisions, though, the orders keep coming in. Sometimes we'll do 600 in a day."

The annual payroll at Mueller is $14 million, and the money is earned. Tour this plant, and you get a reminder of what hard labor is. There is no easy way to forge a 500-lb. fire hydrant out of molten railroad tracks. It's hot, loud, dirty, physical work. In an eight-hour shift that begins at 7, you get two 10-minute breaks and a 15-minute lunch.

Royce Clayton, 60, who has worked at the same exact machine for 23 years, goes fishing in his mind every day. That hook he brings down off the crane, to load the underground elbow of the hydrant onto a machine that bores holes into it, might as well be the hook at the end of a line he drops into Guntersville Lake. No fewer than 256 times a day, every day, he drops his line.

There's catfish in the lake, Royce says. Bass and crappie too. When he doesn't think about fishing, he thinks about eating at the Catfish Cabin. "It's best hush puppies you ever ate."

And that's how Royce gets through the day. "People say I'm lying, but I like coming in here," says Royce. "I can't sit still. You can ask my wife."

Billy Watson, the man they call Opie because he looks a little like the kid from Mayberry, was drenched with sweat one day in the Mueller lunchroom, where he made himself a sandwich of white bread and vacuum-packed ham he'd brought from home. On the job since he got out of high school 15 years ago, Watson connects the aboveground portion of hydrants to the belowground portion, pushing iron logs around with the help of an overhead crane.

"Your feet hurt, and you'll be home mowing the grass on Saturday, and your hands will go numb on you," he says. All of which is relative; he's happy to have the job, the benefits, the $12 an hour. "After you've worked in a poultry plant," which he did briefly, "nothing's so bad you can't handle it."

Opie's got his mind on something else all day too, like Royce. After his kids Ashley, 12, and Caleb, 9, were born, he and his wife Rhonda started thinking about a bigger house. They'd look at magazines for design ideas and go and get books out of the library, books on how to build a place because it'd be cheaper that way. They paid off all their bills too, and when Opie fell in love with seven quiet acres several years ago on the shoulder of Sand Mountain, they bought the property.

They bought the dream.

Opie would draw up plans on a napkin in the Mueller lunchroom and hand them to a buddy who knew how to draw blueprints. "We wanted a place big enough so that if my mother or Rhonda's ever needed, they could move in with us," says Opie. The house took five years to plan and nine months to build, but to sit in it with them now, to hear them talk about it, you wouldn't know they moved in 2 1/2 years ago. It looks new, feels new. And they look as though they haven't yet got over the fact that it's theirs.

"It's got a ways to go," says Opie as he and the entire family lead a tour of every room, including the unfinished ones on the second floor. They work on it when they can, but Rhonda's in customer services at the First Bank of Boaz, and Opie works a second job, landscaping yards from the time he gets off Mueller until dark. And Sundays, the whole family spends the day at church.

But the house will get done, Opie says. He's a humble man, but as you stand on his back deck with him and look across his acres toward the green rise of sweet gums and oaks in the distance, as you look beyond the flats and through the trees to a sliver of the lake, you can feel his pride. A pride that's there with that fire-hydrant job too. Opie will be on the road somewhere, come across a hydrant and have to get out of the car and go look to see if it's one of his.

"It means something," he says, "if it's something you made yourself."

THE NEW COWBOYS

"To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants." BENITO MUSSOLINI

Say goodbye to Ozzie and Harriet. This is modern dysfunction now. It's Junior with a DO NOT ENTER sign on his door, locked in a room lighted only by the red heat of annihilation. You haven't seen him in days. You're not even sure he's still in there. Last you knew, he was 48 hours into an Internet death match with complete strangers, or his eyes were bugged out of his head from a take-no-prisoners game of Carmageddon or Duke Nuke'em or Redneck Rampage.

It used to be you could bang on the door and tell him he'd never amount to anything if he didn't pull himself away from that garbage, but now you've lost that too.

He knows about Dallas.

He knows that at the top of a downtown skyscraper is a guy whose father once slammed his face into a video-game screen. And now John Romero, 30, who ditched college, has the same birthday as Bill Gates, wears cutoffs to work and cruises there in one of his Ferraris or BMWs, or possibly the yellow Humvee, is a multimillionaire game designer like his three partners. Romero can't put gas in his car now without being hounded for autographs by admiring gamers. Maybe your son even knows Romero has 120 employees, some of them teenagers, making up to $100,000 a year TO PLAY AND DESIGN VIDEO GAMES!

Your boy's not coming back.

The Dallas of Big Oil and Big Football and Big Everything, assassination included, is now the big bloody shoot-'em-up video-game production center of the world.

"We," says Tom Hall, one of Romero's partners, "are the new cowboys."

The man does not exaggerate. That skyscraper, one of the most prestigious in town, has a full tank of old money and gray suits, which is to say, oil has been very, very good to Dallas. The place crawls with bankers and lawyers and investment drones, and the ones with the biggest spurs can take the elevator up to the 39th floor and sip Jack Daniels at the Petroleum Club.

The vid kids have to go downstairs to get to the Petroleum Club. ION Storm, the hottest name in what the industry calls 3-D shooter games, rents the penthouse suite on the 54th and 55th floors, with nothing but clouds and glass for a ceiling. When they first started riding the elevators, says company president Hall, 33, the suits "thought we were delivery boys."

"There isn't a meeting where we don't just look at each other and laugh," says Todd Porter, the oldest of the four owners at 38. The four, who worked for different companies in the Dallas area and decided just 1 1/2 years ago to do their own thing, attracted an initial investment of $13 million and now have $25 million behind them, by Porter's count.

It's a story of entrepreneurial hustle, talent and smarts. But you could easily accuse these guys of helping create a generation of slugs and violence-addicted sociopaths.

So let's accuse them.

Not so fast, they say. What about television, the movies, the nightly news? A kid who can't tell the difference between blowing up a computerized freak and taking Dad's high-powered rifle out to the schoolyard, says marketing director Mike Breslin, 25, might not have got the best parenting.

True enough. So how might a parent reconnect with a child whose brain has been sucked out of his head by a gory video game?

"Maybe a parent can death-match with their kid to share an activity," says Romero.

We should have stayed in that RV.

Keep one thing in mind, says Breslin. All ION Storm's games, several of which will be released in the next 1 1/2 years, are about good vs. evil. And about character growth. "Splattered blood and flying meat" just make the experience more real, says Romero.

Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when these guys go down to the Petroleum Club for cocktails?

Though each of the four owners had been majorly successful before this venture, it was Romero's rock star-level status as co-creator of the revolutionary games Doom and Quake that generated the buzz, marked Dallas as the blood-and-gore capital and drew talent from around the world. Talent that is now assembled in a Mad Max postindustrial setting where the refrigerators are packed with soft drinks, the food is free, and with several lounges and sack centers. Why go home at all?

"We've all slept here," says boy-genius programmer Joey Liaw, 19, who deferred a scholarship to Stanford to work here. In one year, he says, he's made enough money to cover two years at Stanford, which he says costs $32,000 a year.

"I'll call the office at 4 in the morning, and half my team is here," says Porter, who has a pillow on the sofa in his office. In the death march leading to a deadline on a game Porter had to finish early in June, his 20-member crew worked seven days a week for six months.

Without complaint.

"This is not a job. This is an obsession," he says. "When we were kids, all we had was toy soldiers and our imaginations. Now we can make them walk and talk and fight."

Exactly. With nothing, at all, left to the imagination.

HOME OF HONEST OPINIONS

I can resist everything except temptation. OSCAR WILDE

The hamburger you eat, the shampoo you use, the shirt you wear, the chair you sit in, no matter where you live in America, basically came from a mall in Des Moines, Iowa.

The computer you use, the bicycle you ride, the color of colors, no matter where you live, make you a Midwesterner at heart.

There is a reason why McDonald's does not have a McFalfa Sprouts sandwich.

"Companies are trying to reach a market that is middle of the road," says Vada Grantham, a test marketer.

You don't go to Boston for that. You don't go to San Francisco.

You go to Des Moines.

Vada Grantham's wife Teresa began their test-marketing business in their basement in 1987. Today they have 500 employees and 200 clients, and they have moved to the test-marketing equivalent of an Ivy League campus.

The Park Fair Mall.

T.L. GRANTHAM & ASSOCIATES, the mall's sign blinks with flashing yellow lights. "Your link to the consumer...Iowa's largest food demonstration company."

It is this mall location, the Granthams say, that gives them an edge over the competition. The Park Fair has a senior center, a post office, a grocery store, retail shops and, most important, the Iowa Department of Transportation.

It's the same in every state. If you're there for a driver's license, there's a chance you'll die waiting. And for TLG employees looking for test targets, it's fish in a barrel. "We can test everything from infant formulas to hearing aids without leaving the premises," Teresa says.

The Granthams say they can't divulge what products they're testing now. They do admit they helped McDonald's with its Big Xtra burger campaign (the Whopperlike 4.5-oz. lettuce-and-tomato burger debuted in Des Moines in January and is being tested in 10% of the chain's U.S. restaurants), and they had a role in Pepsi's decision to change the color scheme on its cans.

"In Middle America, you get a lot of honest opinions," says Vada, unintentionally insulting the entire left and right coasts. But then, would you want, say, New York City, which is basically a psychiatrist's office surrounded by a moat, to decide whether Wheat Thins need a makeover? "We don't jump on a lot of fads. We can get a more accurate reading on the long-term responses of consumers."

Des Moines has both urban and rural within minutes of each other, says Jeff Bradford, chairman of the marketing department at Drake University in Des Moines, and that's attractive to companies that want products tested. With its housing and development boom, Des Moines "captures the growth and the shift in the economy that's taking place across the entire country," Bradford says.

From its home office at the mall, TLG sends those apron-wearing Betty Crockers into supermarkets with free food samples. It also administers taste tests, leads focus groups, conducts mall intercepts (these are the people who carry clipboards and are always smiling, which apparently works in the Midwest).

At Park Fair, TLG lures mall rats to its laboratory, often rewarding them with cash or food. Once there, they might sit in the focus rooms and chew gum for hours to test new flavors, or they might examine a fleet of new banana-seat bicycles and comment on the colors and styles. All the while, clients can view the testing through two-way mirrors. For one test, 35 children came in to sample 34 different juices. Hey, it pays to go to the experts.

Ninety percent of the mall intercepts get $2 to $7 just to fill out a questionnaire, or they get a product to take home and try out. For those who put in more time, say, in a focus group, as much as $150 can be earned. And all this is done in the cozy comfort of thoroughly researched decor. Pinks and blues, says Teresa, are "calming colors."

Sometimes there's no advertising or fanfare when a company wants to test a product. A new sandwich just shows up on the menu at a fast-food restaurant, and the people of Des Moines have no idea they are the only rats in the national laboratory.

With millions of dollars at stake, you don't flip a coin. You ask Des Moines.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest. MARK TWAIN

They had it going here for a while. They had the carpets, yeah, but that wasn't all. This was both the carpet and the beauty-queen capital.

Which is not to say beauty does not still walk down the street in Dalton, Ga., and into the Oakwood for eggs and grits, or into Jimmy's for a cocktail. But the Miss Resaca Beach pageant is no more. It could be that when Marla Maples, who won the thing, ended up with Donald Trump as her trophy, it took the shine off the prize.

A girl doesn't need to leave Dalton to get herself a millionaire.

Zack Norville, who is one of them, is wearing a necktie with a print of $100 bills, and he's talking about what a fine place this is. "Very cosmopolitan for a small town in the South." He is the daddy, by the way, of another famous Daltonian blond: newswoman Deborah Norville is his little girl. Yep, Marla Maples and Deborah Norville, and that's just the start.

"I judged the last Miss Resaca pageant they had," says Zack, who owns a company that supplies raw materials to the 171 carpet manufacturers in Georgia. He's showing us the pictures in the poolroom out at his spread, which looks like J.R. Ewing's ranch. Zack says he's thinking about turning the front acreage into a landing strip for his Piper.

Things are good in Dalton. Per capita income is among the highest in the state at $24,773, and Zack Norville's warehouse manager, Travis Burns, drives a Jaguar, for crying out loud.

"There's a job here for every man, woman and baby at the breast," says Pastor Daniel Stack of St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church.

Here's this little place, 90 minutes north of Atlanta, where a woman named Catherine Evans Whitener (1880-1964) made a tufted chenille bedspread, and then another, and another, and then someone made a machine that did it faster, and then in 1996, 1.641 billion sq. yds. of carpet were shipped to every place from Hackensack to Hong Kong.

Three-fourths of the nation's $10 billion wholesale carpet is made here today. But alas, there is a problem in Dalton.

Things are so good, they ran out of workers.

First they used up all the available bodies in Whitfield County, and then from bordering Alabama to the west and Tennessee to the north. Still, they were short. So the town fathers and the carpet moguls did something about it.

They got on a plane and went to Mexico.

If they could recruit Mexican teachers, they reasoned, they could make Dalton more attractive for families to come across the border. The new teachers could help the Mexican kids learn English and the American kids learn Spanish.

"It's not far-fetched to think that every child in Dalton could grow up not just bilingual but familiar with both cultures," says Erwin Mitchell, a local attorney who helped recruit 17 teachers from the University of Monterrey in Mexico, where carpet mogul Bob Shaw had a contact. Dalton used public funds, of which there is a big supply, to fly the teachers here, put them up in apartments and buy them all memberships in a health club.

"I'll tell you something," says Mitchell, a dapper, white-haired Southern gentleman of 74. "Hispanic and Anglo children alike are excited about what's happening, and a lot of the rest of us are too. But I'm being selfish about it. I know these children are here to stay--as butchers, Realtors, car salesman, physicians--and Dalton is a richer place because of it."

You can get cynical if you want and point out that there were some ENGLISH ONLY T shirts at first, or that economic good times help conceal the bonehead hatred that exists everywhere. But it's not worth it. California's got economic good times too, and its anti-immigration conniptions make that state look like a backwater compared to what's going on here in Dalton of the rural South.

This country never stops surprising you.

Marcelo Salaises, 30, misses Mexico but says the living is good in Dalton. On $10.60 an hour with benefits and profit sharing at Durkan Patterned Carpet, where he's in quality control, he and his wife bought a nice three-bedroom house for $49,000. And Thomas Durkan III, he says, orchestrated the donation of private land and helped raise $1 million for the construction of a soccer complex used primarily by Mexican families.

Dalia Martinez, 29, and all but one of her fellow teachers recruited from Mexico intend to return next school year. "When we arrived, they had banners welcoming us. At the apartments, they had food in the refrigerators for us. It's been very warm, and we've been able to make a difference for the children."

So many Hispanics have moved to Whitfield County in the past several years, it's standing room only at St. Joseph's. Carl Bouckaert, a parishioner and the owner of Beaulieu of America carpets, could not help noticing. Thirty percent of his work force of 7,500 (soon to be expanded to 10,000) is Hispanic.

"It was clear they were going to have to build a new church, and to do that for a lot of people costs a lot of money. My wife and I came to the conclusion we should do something major. It was a chance to give back to a community that's been good to us."

So they wrote a check for $1 million.

What more can we say?

FINGER-LICKIN' GOOD

'Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers. SHAKESPEARE

Here in the state where the speed limit is whatever you think is reasonable and prudent, a state that lives in a self-imposed exile from the other 49 while it considers whether to just be its own republic, Rod Lincoln had grown tired of life as a school superintendent and bought a saloon 15 years ago in Clinton, Mont. That's probably more of a lateral move than you might think, because you still have to wake people up occasionally, still have to expel troublemakers and still have to lead and inspire.

It's the last part that we focus on now.

"A bar has to have a signature event," Rod is saying as he serves up drinks at the Rock Creek Lodge, a joint that has billiard tables, slot machines and a 5-ft.-tall wooden bull. It is the kind of place where you might expect to see Harry Dean Stanton in an argument with Marjoe Gortner over an eight-ball combination, a knife fight breaks out, and no one remembers either the assailants or the victims as quiet and normal. "I don't care if it's maggot races," Lincoln says. "You have to have something."

And so Dr. Lincoln--he has a doctorate in education--in what can be attributed to either the ceaseless wonder of America's entrepreneurial spirit or a particularly good batch of hooch, invented the Testicle Festival. "I dabbled in poetry when I was young, and it just sort of rolled off the tongue," says Lincoln, who requests that details of his education be downplayed.

Rocky Mountain oysters are a delicacy in Montana. They are, of course, the business part of the bull, and they are served breaded and deep fried, like chicken fingers, though they are not yet available in any Happy Meal deal. Each year for 15 years, Lincoln has sold more of them than the year before. It was two tons' worth last year at the 15th annual festival, which drew a record 15,000 people over five days without any arrests.

Motels, restaurants and other saloons in the Missoula area all cleaned up, although Kim Latrielle says the Chamber of Commerce doesn't promote the Testicle Festival because "it is not a family-type event."

"It's a tremendous boost to the local economy," says Jacque Christofferson. She owns a logging, limousine and liquor company--nobody around here finds that the least bit unusual--and two of the three product lines are in great demand at festival time. "Rod does 40% of his annual liquor sales during the festival." Talk about entrepreneurial genius. Liquor them up, then drive them home.

Judging by the video of last year's soiree ($29.95), the festival might be the only event in America in which bikers, yuppies, lawyers, the Winnebago crowd and perhaps even militiamen can team up in bull chip-toss competition and coexist in a blissful celebration of...of...what was it again?

"You just put on your ugliest pair of pants and go crazy, that's all," says Fred Wagner, 47, a logger.

"We never actually asked anyone to take their clothes off," says Dr. Lincoln. "They just sort of volunteered."

We have resisted, until now, pointing out the obvious. But given the nature of the news emanating from the nation's capital over the past year, there exist a host of new promotional opportunities in Clinton for the 16th annual Testicle Festival this September. New fields of competition. Look-alike contests. Caravans rolling in from D.C. We can think of one person in particular who would make a great festival queen.

No one is more aware of this than Dr. Lincoln.

"It could be big," he says. "It could be bigger than ever."

A PYROTECHNIC TALE

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. JOHN UPDIKE

There is no other way to end the story.

An eye doctor named George Zambelli Jr. makes his early-morning rounds near Pittsburgh, completes as many laser-correction surgeries as he can, then gets in a Mercedes and speeds north 45 minutes. When he gets to New Castle he kisses his father on the cheek, then helps him mix chemicals and explosives.

They call themselves the First Family of Fireworks.

New Castle is the color of tools left out in the rain. Heavy industry died an ugly death here decades ago, leaving behind rust and bricks and George ("Boom-Boom") Zambelli Sr., 73. When 50-year-old George Jr. gets to New Castle at noon, his father has been at work six hours.

The old man is old school. Look at him in his office, a gruff gnome surrounded by papers and notes, lost in a cloud of his own thoughts on the 1,200 Fourth of July fireworks shows that he will produce across the states.

Twelve hundred.

"Computer?" he scoffs, dozens of folders at his feet, on his desk, on chairs. Fireworks shows are electronically fired nowadays, but for filing and accounting, Zambelli lives comfortably in the past. He taps his head with a finger. There's your computer.

The old man has a chef prepare his meals in the abandoned restaurant of the converted hotel that is headquarters for Zambelli Fireworks Internationale. That way, he doesn't waste time going across the street. Especially not with the millennium only 18 months away and the orders already coming in from around the world.

That is the kind of man he is. A man who carries what looks like a 19[cents] comb in his shirt pocket because, he says, it's closer to his head that way.

"I wish I had three like him," Junior says.

Dad gives him a look. He's terrifically proud of his son the big-shot doctor--and of his four daughters, one of whom is a dentist and three of whom work for him, along with 60 other year-round employees. But there is always something in his eye that says this medicine thing is no life for a guy. Not a guy who could be in fireworks. This is art. This is science. This is family. "You know," he says in monotone seriousness, and Junior is rolling his eyes before the old man completes the sentence, "it actually takes longer to become a first-rate pyrotechnician than to be a doctor."

This story, of course, comes out of the old country. You don't find anyone this stubborn and proud who didn't get it from a hungry immigrant who came over with empty pockets and big eyes. George Sr.'s father Antonio boarded a boat in Naples in 1893 with nothing but a copy of the family's secret fireworks recipes. Hilly New Castle reminded him of Naples in look and climate--as it did several other Italian pyrotechnicians. So the first thing he did was lock those formulas in a safe, and that is where they are today.

Boom-Boom Zambelli rolled firecracker tubes when he was 7 and was a fireworks shooter at 16. When he graduated from college in 1947, Antonio said to him, Son, it's yours. "I guess he assumed I knew it was a family business and that family comes first. He didn't have to say anything else." George Sr.'s brother-in-law was killed in a fireworks-assembly accident in 1950, but they barely stopped for a funeral. The danger is always there, he says. That's why you respect the material, and that's why you go after the best pyrotechnicians, the guys whose fathers and grandfathers were shooters, and you pay them $60,000 or more a year.

All but one of the other New Castle fireworks companies have folded. Zambelli is in an elite group of "the country's foremost players," according to John Conkling of the American Pyrotechnics Association. How elite? Zambelli did the Statue of Liberty celebration in 1986. It did four presidential inaugurations, the Desert Storm troop return, the Pope in Toronto and, perhaps most important, the Elvis Presley stamp unveiling.

We promised Americana in this piece, didn't we?

George Sr. says the company did eight figures--at least $10 million--in business last year and that for the millennium he's negotiating with "a South American country that wants shows in three cities simultaneously at $1 million per show."

Antonio's boy did O.K.

And now you know that anything is possible in America. A man gets off a boat from another land, sets up shop, and his son becomes a millionaire painting the sky.

George's wife Connie and the rest of the family are trying to get him to slow down, but he doesn't listen. He beat cancer a few years back and slowed up during the chemo, but he wouldn't quit. In downtown New Castle, the FIREWORKS CAPITAL banners fly because of him.

This is enterprise. This is family. This is work.

He knows nothing else.

There's only one time when Boom-Boom relaxes. At Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium in May, Zambelli Internationale put on a gargantuan show that had George fidgeting all week in anticipation. "You're dealing with explosives," he said. "It's like a battlefield. Anything can happen."

The Pirates won a tight one that night, the forecast rain never fell, and the fireworks after the game were spectacular.

George sat on the third-base side with his head tilted back, his face radiant under a shower of exploding light. The crowd ooohhhed chrysanthemums and aaahhhed weeping willows and the sound of exploding air. "Everybody loves fireworks," he said. "Democrats, Republicans, young, old, rich poor. It doesn't matter. Everybody loves them."

When it was over, he stepped into an elevator for the ride down to the parking lot, and another family was in there. George couldn't help himself.

"You enjoy the fireworks show?" he asked.

"It was terrific."

He smiled just a little and said, "That's us." --With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer/Des Moines

With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer/Des Moines