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https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/24PurpleLights.mp3
On a foggy Sunday night in Juneau, the corner of Ferry Way and Marine Way is made eerie by a violet glow coming from a nearby street light. It’s just one of several lights around town that have changed colors.
A Curious Juneau listener saw these lights around the city and asked KTOO why the lights have a dark purple hue. As it turns out, the color is a mistake and the state is working to fix it.
Juneau resident Max Stanley said he and his girlfriend noticed the lights in October when they were driving toward Thane.
“At first we wondered if it’s something for Halloween,” Stanley said. “As we continued to drive, we realized it’s just — all the street lights have this hue.”
Stanley said over the next few weeks, they noticed the same purple hue coming from several other street lights all over town.
“It’s pretty noticeable sometimes when there’s one of the purple ones and then right after an older white one,” Stanley said. “So we just were wondering why there are these new purple-hued lights around town.”
The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities maintains a lot of Juneau’s street lights. Spokesperson Sam Dapcevich said the lights actually aren’t new at all and the purple hue isn’t intentional.
“The purple hue in the LED lights is caused by a computer chip issue, possibly a defect,” Dapcevich said.
The department is working with the manufacturer, American Electric Lighting, to get the lights fixed and Juneau isn’t the only place where the issue has been reported.
“It was occurring in quite a few places around the country,” Dapcevich said. “It appears that most of the LED street lights have three colors. They have yellow, red and blue and the yellow color is failing.”
Of course, when red and blue mix, the resulting color is purple. Dapcevich said most of the lights are less than 5 years old. They’re still under warranty, so the manufacturer should cover the cost of fixing them as well – though he didn’t have an answer as to when that would happen.
In the 2014 film “Clouds of Sils Maria,” the climax of the story features a scene in the Swiss Alps where the two lead actresses, Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche, hike up high in the mountains to witness an early-morning cloud formation called the Maloja Snake — a mist that flows like water along the valley floor.
A Curious Juneau listener wrote in saying they’d witnessed something similar along the Gastineau Channel, and they wondered if there are any Lingít stories or a Lingít name for this cloud feature.
https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/27clouds.mp3
Wes Adkins with the National Weather Service office in Juneau had never heard of the movie or the Maloja Snake, but once he saw clips from the film, he knew exactly what it was.
“I think there is not a meteorologist in town who doesn’t observe this with awe every time they go hiking, every time they commute down Egan Drive,” he said. “We see it all the time here.”
In Juneau you’ll see these clouds crawling down Perseverance Trail or along Treadwell Ditch on Douglas Island. They’re very snake-like and cling to the sides of the mountains, close to the ground. Sometimes a fat snake as wide as the channel rolls into town.
Adkins says that the changes in temperature, pressure and moisture that cause the snake to form are always there but not always visible. But sometimes, when conditions are right, you can actually see the boundary between cloud and no cloud.
“So what’s really cool is when you start to see … these Maloja Snakes when they start to do flips or cartwheels,” he said. “And people can witness this, you know, just above them in downtown just over Gastineau Channel.”
There’s not a lot of cloud watching in Juneau. We don’t get white puffy clouds that appear in the shapes of animals while we lie in a field on our backs. So these moving fog banks — these snakes — are some of the most dynamic clouds we have.
But we don’t have snakes in Alaska, so what should we call them?
X̱’unei Lance Twitchell is an Associate Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast.
“I started looking through some resources,” he said. “And I found this verb, which is naagáas’: ‘Clouds are moving along.'”
Naagáas’ is a Lingít word. It also means migration.
“‘Gáas’ is a house post,” he said. “So this is the verb. There’s a version of it to say, ‘aadé haa wligáas’: ‘We migrated there.’ Which would be sort of like saying, ‘We picked up our house post, and we brought it over there.'”
So naagáas’ would be migrating clouds.
But X̱’unei found a metaphor where maybe there is just a cloud. For instance, Lingít has a whole bunch of readily available phrases to describe sunlight.
“Sometimes the Lingít language is just so matter of fact,” he said. “And I think what I’ve heard seems to be that way about clouds. Because we have clouds like 300 days a year, it figures you’d have this whole stack of metaphors for sunlight.”
X̱’unei says he doesn’t know if naagáas’ has been used to describe these clouds before. From multiple elders the consensus seemed to be that if there were another Lingít word for these cloud snakes, it might have been lost with the loss of language speakers.
“One of the great tragedies of colonialism — and there are many — is that nobody really took the time to figure out what the people knew about the land around them, the weather, the water,” he said.
You can see naagáas’ any time of year and any time of day in Juneau, but if you really want to be intentional about it, Wes Adkins at the National Weather Service says dawn or dusk are good bets, when the temperature is changing. Or just before or after a rainy spell.
The weather service doesn’t include these cloud snakes in their forecasts because they don’t really impact the weather. They don’t bring rain. They aren’t harbingers of storms. But Adkins says we should still be on the lookout for them.
“I’m originally from Alabama. We were really flat there, for the most part,” he said. “There’s nothing like this. So I think we can all relish this chance to see something special.”
And X̱’unei says the weather service and the rest of us should start practicing how to talk about it in Lingít.
As part of KTOO’s Curious Juneau project, a listener asked: “Was there really a gun range in the basement of Harborview Elementary School?”
The short answer is yes. It was there for decades, and there are plenty of people still around in Juneau who remember it.
https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/05GunRange.mp3
Flipping through decades of Juneau’s high school yearbooks, you’ll find some dated extracurriculars, like candy stripers and the Future Homemakers of America.
You’ll also find the rifle club, which was founded in 1934. Karleen Grummett is a former member.
“Rifle club was one of the more common groups to join in high school, and it sounded like fun to me,” she said. “They had both boys’ and girls’ rifle clubs, and they were both very well attended.”
Grummett participated in the club from 1958 until 1960, when she graduated from what was then Juneau High School (not yet Juneau-Douglas High School).
“It was just assumed that that’s where you went to learn how to shoot a rifle,” she said. “It was in the basement of the Harborview school.”
She joined the group hoping that if she could properly handle a gun, her father would take her hunting.
“That didn’t happen, but we still had a lot of fun,” Grummett said. “It was really noisy down there in that basement, with all the guns going off. I have nothing but fond memories of it.”
The girls would start in the prone position and work up to sitting, kneeling and standing.
“There were certain goals for each of those positions,” she said. “At the end of the year, you were awarded some brass bars that you put on a pin on your high school sweater.”
Club members could work their way up to “expert” or “distinguished” levels, and Grummett was proud to achieve the expert title.
“But I was a little disappointed when I found out later that the way to get your ‘distinguished’ was to get special time at the gun range, and that wasn’t readily available to women at that time,” she said.
But the high school rifle club wasn’t the only organization to use the Harborview gun range. James Cartmill wasn’t yet 10 years old when he started taking gun safety classes through Territorial Sportsmen in the early 1970s.
“There was an open area down there [in the Harborview basement] right next to the rifle range that we would go in and play around until our names were called,” he said.
Courses were held for several weeks each year, and Cartmill’s family was heavily involved.
“My mom would be the one that would take down the names at the front door,” he said. “You would check in with her, and then they would have movies on shooting safety and hunting. My dad would run the movie projectors in the library area.”
At one point, Cartmill remembers there being about 50 kids involved in the program.
“There was, I believe, five different stations, and each one of the stations had a coach or an adult there to tell you how to use the gun, your breathing, your sight alignment, your trigger squeeze,” he said.
At the end of each day, the kids took their targets home to show off and later received certificates of completion. A few years later, in 1986, Ryan Scott took a hunter education class in the Harborview basement. Now he teaches the course through Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game, but a lot has changed since he first learned to shoot.
“Many of us, when we were older, especially in high school when we were able to drive, would hunt in the mornings before school started or in the afternoons as soon as it got done,” Scott said. “Certainly, I had shotguns in my vehicle because that’s what I was doing after school.”
Nowadays, taking a gun to school would land you in a lot of trouble. Debates over American gun laws heated up over the years as mass shootings became more frequent.
Scott said his courses aren’t just for hunters, and being familiar with a gun could help dispel some of the fear people associate with them.
“That does give an individual more comfort, just understanding what the firearm really is and what it will do,” Scott said. “And then also knowing, well, this is the type of ammunition. You know, it’s not a shotgun shell, it’s a cartridge, and this is a revolver, this is a semi-automatic pistol, things like that.”
Scott said that education could come in handy even if you don’t have a gun in your home because it’s not uncommon to come across one in someone else’s, especially in Alaska.
Continuing through those high school yearbooks, the number of rifle club members gets much smaller in the late ’70s, then the club disappears completely.
As for the rifle range at Harborview, it’s long gone. The school was renovated in the early 2000s and didn’t include a range. Around that time, a new gun range was built in Montana Creek.
But for James Cartmill, when it comes to gun safety, some things haven’t changed. He and his two grown children still go hunting, employing the lessons he learned in Harborview’s basement more than 40 years ago.
“You know, it’s not a toy, it’s a weapon,” he said. “That’s something that I’ve instilled in my kids.”
Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away!
https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/28GOLDDREDGE-CJ-NPR1.mp3
It’s after work, and the summer sun and the tide are out at John Wright’s go-to fishing spot in Juneau: the wide, sandy beach where Sheep Creek meets Gastineau Channel.
“I’ve been fly fishing in Alaska — Juneau specifically — for seven years. I’ve been fly fishing for 20 years. I’m 32, so that’s a good chunk of my life. … This is probably one of the first places I fished when I moved here, and the first place I broke a rod, here as well.”
He caught something too big.
“Yeah, the chum salmon. FEROCIOUS.”
A few years back, he says he started noticing someone showing up on the beach with a different hobby.
“If I recall correctly, my first years here, there were no dredgers here. And then one day, there was maybe one? And it just seems like, within a couple years there were many. And you know, I’ve just always been curious.”
They’re dredging — for gold.
On this day, we count seven different rafts on the beach with motors, pumps, hoses, ropes, wheeled sluice boxes and plastic tubs. It’s weekend warriors’ gear for recreational gold dredging.
The rafts themselves are made of pallets, wood and big foam blocks lashed together, about the size of a big mattress. The combination of improvised, DIY stuff and special gold-sifting gear probably ordered off the internet looks real janky, like something out of “Mad Max” or “Waterworld.”
The beach itself is pockmarked with unnatural pits about as deep as a bathtub.
“They’ve been pretty busy,” Wright says.
The rafts are tied up to old pilings and big rocks that’ll be underwater when the tide comes in. They’re unattended, except for one. We head over so Wright can ask one of these DIY dredgers about what they’re doing.
“What if they don’t want to share their secrets?” Wright wonders aloud.
A pitbull named King is keeping watch around a fresh pit in the sand. His owner is in hip waders, spraying seawater from a hose into the pit. His name is Nathan Brooks, and he’s game to answer Wright’s questions over King’s protest.
“How much time do you think you spend out here, and is there a season?” Wright asks.
“Depends on the tides, really,” Brooks says. “The season is more when it’s warm, not so much the frozen ground. Other than that, it’s when the tides let us. You know, the best times is when the tide’s going out.”
Brooks’ raft is about 50 feet away in the water. One hose is running seawater up the beach to the pit. Another hose in the pit is sucking the slurry out and up to the top of his sluice box. He’s got it propped up on a float and some buckets.
We can’t see through the slurry, but the bottom of the box is lined with special mats with a bunch of little ridges. They’re supposed to trap tiny bits of gold and let the less-dense sand and pebbles run off.
Brooks has been out here all afternoon. He won’t know if he’s had a good day until the end.
“On a good shift, we can run an ounce a day, you know, if we catch both tides. We can pull an ounce out of the ground,” Brooks says. “I’ve pulled over 40 ounces out of here.”
Spot gold prices have spiked above $1,300 an ounce a few times this year. When the math catches up with our brains, all that comes out of our mouths is “Whoa!” and “Wow!” and some goofy chuckles.
“When I see this, I just see this big, kind fan of sand,” Wright says, looking across the beach. “What do you see when you look at this landscape?”
“I see money! That’s what I see when I look around,” Brooks says. “There is a payout, but it’s nice just being able to let my dog run out on the beach, and hang out here and just kind of do my own thing.”
He got into this hobby with his dad three or four years ago. King helps out too, pulling gear up the beach.
“He really does, actually. I hook him up to the end of it, he helps me pull the heavy thing back up, in and out.”
There are a lot of different rules around recreational mining. Some kinds require state permits, some don’t. Brooks says this spot is special, because if you follow the rules, you don’t need a permit, and unlike other spots, you’re not jumping on anyone else’s claim. The sand is special, too: It’s the pulverized tailings of a nearby mine that closed long ago, so there’s leftover gold.
Eventually, Brooks shuts off his pumps and wraps up for the day.
He points out some sand spotted with yellow flecks in his mats.
“Not too bad,” he says. “There’s some of it. It’s in that real fine area, you can see it up in that corner.”
It isn’t very shiny.
“Nope, that’s a mistake,” Brooks says. “People always think it’s real shiny, and that’s that pyrite. Which, there is pyrite in there, also.”
John Wright had a good day, too. He caught two Dolly Varden trout. But he doesn’t think he’ll be switching hobbies.
“No,” Wright says. “I think I’ll just stick with mine. Mine’s much more peaceful.”
For a profile of an especially colorful gold dredger, check out filmmaker Beau Sylte’s short film about Ray Rusaw from a few years ago.
Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it here. You can also subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities at ktoo.org/curious.
The other day, Phil Fleming was loading up a car in the parking lot of the Costco in Juneau. He said a salty version of something you may have heard before.
“Just now on the phone, actually, a woman was saying, ‘Yeah, that’s the smallest damn Costco I’ve ever seen,’” he said. “She’s comparing it to the Seattle and Anchorage ones. … It’s one of the smallest, from what I’ve heard.”
But is it the smallest Costco in the world?
“As far as I can tell, that is true, yes,” said Costco Wholesale Assistant Vice President Kevin Green.
He oversees the warehouse club chain’s northwest regional operations. He said that’s out of 770 Costco locations on four continents.
There was some wiggle room in his initial answer, so I pressed him.
“Are there other ones that are close that leave you some doubt?” I asked.
“No. Absolutely not,” Green said.
Green said the Juneau Costco, built in 1993, was a prototype, one of only a few that small. There was also one in Sequim, Washington. A full-sized Costco eventually replaced that one.
“And yeah, at the time, it was a test to see if that kind of smaller-market format would work. We’ve since decided that it probably doesn’t,” Green said. “But it does work in Juneau.”
Juneau’s Costco is about half the size of a typical store, which is around 160,000 square feet. Like the one that opened in Fairbanks in November.
And it’s only a third the size of the world’s biggest in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was also a test build, Green said. It opened in 2015.
In Juneau, Green said the geography limits growth and makes shipping challenging. But it is a profitable store, with 2-to-3 percent growth per year and 100-plus employees.
Back in the parking lot, customer Steve Houlihan ventured a guess about why Juneau’s store can cut it.
“I think, ’cause of the villages and all the stuff that comes remotely here, this seems like this gets a lot of use,” Houlihan said. “But it doesn’t seem like the parking lots are as full as down south. You can’t get in and out of them down south.”
There is one patron, about 70 miles away by boat, who’s about as transparent as can be about his dependence on Costco: Toshua Parker, founder of ToshCo.
He said the hardware and grocery store in Gustavus is about eight years old now. When he started it, it was named Icy Strait Wholesale. But the community promptly rebranded it.
“Everyone calls it ToshCo,” Parker said. “Before the doors opened, people started calling it that because my name’s Tosh and most of the products in the beginning all came from Costco in Juneau.”
Parker said Costco’s store-brand products are pretty ubiquitous in Gustavus, which has a year-round population of about 450.
But Caroline Malseed in Juneau thinks she’s missing out.
“We would like it to be bigger,” she said. “More stuff.”
Juneau’s not actually missing out on that much. Green said there are about 3,200 products in Juneau’s warehouse. A typical Costco warehouse has about 3,800 products at a time. That’s a small fraction of the selection at a typical big-box everything store — and part of Costco’s strategy for controlling costs.
The company did explore a 12,000-square-foot expansion in 2006, though it never happened. Green said it’s still a possibility, but there are no current plans.
Fleming is OK with that.
“I can’t say — maybe if I saw a bigger one, then I’d be, ‘Oh yeah! We gotta have a bigger one!’ Right now I’m pretty, pretty gruntled with it,” Fleming said.
I asked Green to weigh in on one more Costco controversy: Within the store, do you shop clockwise, or counterclockwise?
“Um, I always go counterclockwise, yeah,” Green said. “Although, there’s some — like where we work in Issaquah, if you go into that building, you do go clockwise, because that’s the way it’s laid out. So there are some. Yeah.”
Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast, and catch up on past curiosities at ktoo.org/curious.
On Monday, a Juneau Assembly committee authorized the local chapter of Veterans for Peace and the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership to do some new landscape work on the peace sign at the end of Commercial Boulevard.
In January, KTOO told you the story behind the huge peace sign carved out of the foliage on the hill. That was the story with surveyor and guerrilla artist Garrith McLean explaining how he laid out the symbol back in 2008.
“It wasn’t anything political,” McLean had said. “Art for art’s sake, you could say.”
The new work will be on the up-and-up. The groups plan to enlist volunteers to prune some of encroaching vegetation, and to plant spruce seedlings in the footprint of the peace sign. Eventually, they expect the spruce will outgrow and contrast with the existing alders on the hillside.
Gene Miller is a retired forester and member of both groups.
“People will begin to notice, we think, greening up of the spruce trees in about 5 years, because spruce that are well cared for will grow about 18 inches a year,” Miller said. “Most of us won’t be around long enough to see the full outcome.”
He said spruce trees can live as long as 800 years.
The timeline for the work isn’t set, but they’re aiming for this summer.
“Our vision is that the peace sign will persist, and particularly the children in the community today that hear about it as adults maybe 50 years from now, some of them will be coming back to Juneau and say, ‘Oh, I remember when —’ that type of thing,” Miller said.
Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast, and catch up on past curiosities at ktoo.org/curious.
Juneau mom Mara Jennings said she was over the moon when she found out Norah Jones was playing a concert in Juneau. Over the years, she’s sung the nine-time Grammy Award winner’s songs like lullabies to her kids at night.
“Yeah, moms get emotional about the songs they sing to their babies growing up. … I absolutely love her. I actually cried a bunch on Friday.”
That was Feb. 1, when the tickets went for sale online through Ticketfly. Jennings had an account ready and an alarm set to buy tickets. But they immediately appeared sold out.
Face value tickets started at about $60. She found tickets on other websites — of ticket resellers, also commonly known as “scalpers” — with huge markups she can’t afford. Up to $585 each.
So why did the prices get so high?
Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the Curious Juneau page.
First off, Norah Jones’ team, the concert promoter and the ticket vendor all declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment.
But I did find someone with years and years of experience with events and ticketing in Juneau: Nancy DeCherney, executive director of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council. She also oversees Centennial Hall, which Norah Jones booked for her upcoming concert in July.
She can’t think of another act that’s come to Juneau that’s topped the fervor around Norah Jones.
“Well, people seem pretty upset that they didn’t get tickets. Yeah, it’s caused quite a stir,” DeCherney said. “You know, it’s a small venue for heaven’s sakes.”
To be clear, the arts council wasn’t responsible for the Norah Jones ticket sales, but as the manager of the concert venue, it was given access to an early, limited sale for its members. Similarly — full disclosure — Jones’ team gave KTOO members access to the same early sale after buying promotional underwriting.
DeCherney said professional ticket reselling is rare in Juneau. She can remember one notable case during one of her first years involved with Wearable Art.
“A young man came in and bought more Wearable Art tickets than necessary and sold them on eBay,” she said.
She didn’t know if it worked out for him.
“I mean, it’s a small town, and so we all knew who it was. You know what I mean?” she said, laughing.
At its core, the high prices are an indication of a supply-and-demand imbalance. Too many buyers for too few tickets. Mara Jennings suspects pros may have inflated demand for Norah Jones’ concert.
“Well, my message to Ticketfly,” Jennings said, “would be that I think it would be a step of good faith for them to research the ticket sales for this event and to see if someone has purchased an unusually large number of tickets.”
DeCherney said event organizers and ticket vendors like Vendini, which her organization uses, have a bunch of common ways to combat third-party sellers:
Grumpy consumers probably don’t have a legal recourse. A state Department of Law spokesperson said there’s nothing on the books about reselling tickets.
But many states have tried to legislate remedies. New York, for example, outlaws software-assisted mass buys and requires ticket resellers get licensed and bonded.
Which is secondary market stuff. Before tickets get there, performers do have a supply-side lever of their own. Just this week, Norah Jones announced she was adding a third show in Anchorage due to demand as part of her tour.
Due to demand, two new shows have been added this summer. Tickets on sale Thursday, 2/14 at 10am local time.
7/19 – Salt Lake City, UThttps://t.co/WUQbnp5VRH
8/4 – Anchorage, AKhttps://t.co/Yyej6G6vNn pic.twitter.com/0WWGahr7IB
— Norah Jones (@NorahJones) February 13, 2019
And (hint hint, nudge nudge) Norah Jones’ tour schedule has a few buffer days on either side of her show in Juneau.
“I will be hopeful that I will be able to find a way to go enjoy her music live,” Jennings said.
Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the Curious Juneau page.
In Juneau, a lot of people like Wes Adkins have wondered aloud about this:
“Ever since I moved to Juneau in 2012, I’ve been passing by this gigantic peace sign carved into the vegetation above Home Depot and Costco up in Lemon Creek,” he said. “I’m sure aliens didn’t do this. … Who do I need to thank for this creative work of art for our city?”
He’s got surveyor Garrith McLean to thank. We met up the other day at the end of Commercial Boulevard, next to his handiwork.
“Well, you know, my son and I worked on the Home Depot project, building this. And when we were done, we had this bare hill here, and it just seemed like it would be fun to have some artwork on it,” McLean said.
In 2008, he was working for the construction company that built the Home Depot. Now 63 years old, he’s got long hair and a long beard that sits on his overcoat. It’s mostly gray with ginger roots — think ZZ Top, but with a vibe more like The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.”
“Sure! I mean, I’m a giant fan, but I have not been to any of the fan clubs or the drinkathons,” he said. (For the record, his look predates the 1998 Coen brothers movie.)
We hiked up a switchback to the top of the peace sign. The slope was steep below us. It’s getting overgrown with alders, but the vertical part of the peace sign is so precisely aligned with Commercial Boulevard that, visually, it still pops.
McLean pointed to a spot a half-mile away where he surveyed the hillside that would be his canvas.
“I stood at the instrument, way down at the end of the road there —”
“The instrument” is the thing on a heavy tripod that construction crews use that looks like a telescope or chunky camera.
“Yeah, the theodolite. … So what I did was I just calculated the angle, the vertical and horizontal angle for each of the 36 points, at 10 degrees around the circle,” he said.
So the circle is really a 36-sided polygon.
“And so that was pretty easy. Just sine and cosine. … Straight trig. ”
Hear that, high schoolers? Guerrilla art: a practical application for trigonometry.
“The guys ran around on the hill, and they stuck the survey points in the ground all around the circle,” McLean said.
It’s “guerrilla” art because the city owns the land. They didn’t ask permission.
“Well, you know, that was maybe an issue,” McLean said with a guffaw. “So, maybe we should have gotten permission. We didn’t really think or even consider the possibility of it being depicted as graffiti. But it may have been so, in fact.”
Initially, they marked the peace sign with dark topsoil. The hillside was basically bare then, with only a light-colored jute meshing on it for stabilization. He showed me a photo — it’s like someone took a giant Sharpie to the hillside.
He’s not sure, but he thinks city workers used leaf blowers to clear away the topsoil after a few days. McLean didn’t really maintain it after that. He thinks other volunteers over the years have used the markers still in the ground to clear the brush.
The peace symbol itself was popularized during the Cold War. It’s a representation of the letters “n” and “d” for “nuclear disarmament” in a visual code called semaphore.
That really wasn’t on McLean’s mind.
“It wasn’t necessarily a patriotic or political statement of any kind. It was merely a continuation of my life as I lead it,” he said. “My Volkswagen bus has peace symbols all over it, and it was just part of my heritage, I guess you could say. So it wasn’t anything political.”
Or, as Jeff Bridges as The Dude might have said…
https://youtu.be/mdcJrFMGoAI
McLean said it was art for art’s sake.
Cue Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me.”
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