Americana

On a lazy July Sunday in the Nittany Mountains of Pennsylvania, the town of Williamsport, population 31,000, is sort of on vacation. Oh, sure, there's a crafts fair going on with some 150 vendors. And there's that bike race downtown that's got a few members of the Williamsport Emergency Management Service working overtime. But for the most part, as Joe the omelet chef in the Genetti Hotel tells me, "We're dead." Not for long. In a matter of weeks, as it has every summer for about the last 40 years, sleepy little Williamsport will become the focus of not just national but global attention.

"On the road" was an American mantra long before Jack Kerouac sought karma with the Dharma Bums. And early house car nomads had a lot in common with Ken Kesey's busload of hippie-era Merry Pranksters. House cars, converted buses and pickup campers often had a homemade folk art quality similar to the works of those grass-roots visionaries who create perpetual motion machines. From the turn of the 20th century right up until today, autocampers, motor home travelers and Winnebago snow birds have thought of themselves as "gypsies."

A long time ago in a land of not-so- plenty, love turned red-heeled work socks into monkeys. Not real monkeys, mind you, but a handicraft that endured for decades and kept children company in days when toys were dear.These sock monkeys, a piece of Americana nearly forgotten, are experiencing new life in a wave of nostalgia. They can be found in television commercials, at craft shows, shops and, of course, on their own Web pages, where they've developed unique personalities and post photos of themselves.

Radio hits make strange bedfellows.There was a time when the only place you'd hear a song by the Offspring was on an alt-rock or underground station. Nobody thought that odd, either, as the California punk quartet was not aiming for the Top-40. These guys made music for their own amusement, not to push their album to the top of the charts.Imagine their surprise, then, when "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" -- a cranky satire of suburban wannabe- homeboys from the band's latest album, "Americana" -- wound up becoming one of the winter's biggest hits.

We have many African-American heroes to brag about in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County. Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Banneker and Thurgood Marshall are the best-known, but the Barge House Museum in Eastport wants to help bring some of our everyday heroes to light.That's why it's invited Philip Merrill to speak at Eastport Elementary School at 7 p.m. Feb. 16. Merrill, a nationally renowned museum consultant and owner of Nanny Jack & Co. in Baltimore, travels with the Antiques Road Show television series on PBS.He describes himself as a "36-year-old African-American collector with as many as 20,000 pieces of Black Americana."

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. - Ye denizens of uber-cool galleries and art happenings, admit it - you like Norman Rockwell.It's OK. Rockwell is no longer a guilty pleasure of the art world.Yes, critics used to insist that we, if not exactly scorn him, at least dismiss his genial, sentimental art. "Normal Norman," as art critic Robert Hughes snidely dubbed him, was devalued even by the artist himself, who deflected charges against him by saying he was an illustrator, not an artist.Nevertheless, through eight decades he has burrowed deep into the American psyche.

There's almost something patriotic about the notion of Americana. Drawing from roots-oriented strains of country, folk, blues and rock, the sound is as American as apple pie.But you don't have to be American to play it.Indeed, some of the most interesting variations on the American approach can be found north of the border, thanks to bands like Cowboy Junkies. Like fellow Canadians Blue Rodeo, Spirit of the West and the Waltons, the Junkies are intimately familiar with Americana's musical vocabulary.

BONN, Germany -- There is a place along the Rhine River where baseball diamonds are groomed, hamburgers sizzle on barbecues and worshipers pray inside a church that could come from the pages of a Norman Rockwell sketchbook.This is a bucolic diplomatic enclave, nicknamed "Little America," where for nearly 50 years U.S. State Department employees and their families put down roots on the southern edge of Germany's capital."This was the U.S. showing what it could do right after World War II -- the pride of the Yankees," said Mike Hoff, the housing officer.

ARLINGTON, Vt. -- Extensive medical examinations were conducted, specialists were consulted, and the news from the doctors was not good: Charles Fisher, well into his 70s, needed a stomach operation.Fisher had faith in modern medicine, but he also had more consulting to do before consenting to the knife. It was important, he told his doctors, to schedule the operation on a day when the moon was concentrating on his head or feet -- and certainly not on his stomach.And to determine just when that might be, Fisher did what thousands of people have done for a couple of centuries now. He consulted his Hagers-Town Almanack.

For years, a carefully dressed door-to-door salesman was known by his simple greeting: "Edward Angell. I sell Mason Shoes -- all leather arch support and cushioned insoles."It was Edward Carlton Angell's natural-born salesmanship and genial personality that kept him trudging area streets and banging on doors for more than 30-years selling mail-order shoes and, at Christmastime, cards.Mr. Angell, who was known as "The Shoe Man," drowned Sept. 21 in a pond while visiting his brother's farm in Millen, Ga. He was 81.Mr.