Just Add Water

Inspired by a senior engineer for the state of Minnesota Department of Health's Drinking Water Protection Section.

Allow me to get personal for a moment. My dad, a patent draftsman for IBM in Endicott, New York (the "Birthplace of IBM"), was transferred to Rochester, Minnesota, in 1958, a mere two years after Big Blue opened its plant here. At the time, the population of Rochester hovered around 40,000. Our house was situated on a single block of 26th Street Northwest, the south backyard edged against an expansive field that would be the site of Elton Hills Elementary School. One block north was Cascade Street, beyond which was a cornfield.

Dominating the horizon to the northwest, beside 18th Avenue, was a newly erected spheroid water tower now called the John Adams Water Tower, as it looms 138 feet over the like-named middle school (which first opened its doors as John Adams Junior High  School in 1970).

Not at all unlike other boys four to five years old, I made believe the water tower was an alien spacecraft, able to sprout mechanical legs and lumber across the farmland at night, just as H.G. Wells described the Martians' towering three-legged "fighting-machines," armed with heat ray and poisonous "black smoke," in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.

Brazilian-born artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa depicted
the Martian war machines for a 1906 Belgian edition
of H.G. Wells' novel.

Although Steven Spielberg's 2005 update, "War of the Worlds"
(starring Tom Cruise), took several liberties with the source
material, he faithfully recreated the author's conception of the
lofty three-legged walkers, armed with a heat ray that reduces
hapless humans to heaps of wind-blown ashes.

Speaking of rampaging alien water towers, The Tripods was a series of young adult science-fiction novels launched in 1967 by British author John Christopher (real name Sam Youd), positing a post-apocalyptic future, quaintly resembling the Middle Ages, when humanity has been enslaved by the titular Tripods, gigantic machines controlled by extraterrestrial "Masters." The books were adapted for a pair of 25-episode BBC-Australian television series (pictured below).

We see them daily, we drive past them on workaday commutes without a second thought, but just what the heck are water towers? By definition, a water tower is an elevated structure supporting a water tank constructed at such a height sufficient to pressurize a water supply system for the distribution of drinkable water and to provide emergency storage for fire protection. Searching for information beyond the rudimentary, I asked for more details from an acquaintance employed by the state water department, who vaguely said he could answer my questions, but he would have to drown me first.

But seriously, the use of elevated water storage has existed since ancient times in various forms. Actually, aqueducts in Egypt, Greece, and, most prominently the Roman Empire, utilized a similar principle of moving water through a pressurized process, as water was transported by gravity alone through a series of increasingly downward gradients. We're reminded of a scene in "Monty Python's Life of Brian" when Reg (John Cleese), the leader of the People's Front of Judea (pictured below), a group of rebels rebelling against Roman occupation, states, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, aqueducts, a fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Probably the most recognizable water towers in movies are the old board-wood or tin cylinders above a railway where steam engines would replenish the large amounts of water essential for the boiler. It was here, as well, that trains could be restocked with fuel of coal and wood.

During the early days of steam locomotives, water stops were necessary every seven to ten miles, which ate up a large portion of travel time. With the introduction of tender cars to hold water and fuel, trains could rack up 100 to 150 miles without a refill. Not surprisingly, a number of water stops evolved into new settlements.

When a train stopped for water, the boiler-man would swing out the spigot arm and jerk a chain to start the water flow and fill the tender tank. This purportedly inspired the 19th-century slang term "jerkwater town," denoting a settlement too insignificant to have a regular train depot. With the replacement of steam engines by diesel locomotives, many obsolete water stops became the equivalent of ghost towns.

The locomotive passes a water stop tower in the 1983 Charles Bronson
western mystery "Breakheart Pass." The train scenes were filmed on the
short-line Camas Prairie Railroad in northern Idaho.

Unsurprisingly, railroad water stops became a common sight in westerns. Take, for example, "How the West Was Won" (1962), the sprawling epic filmed for the curved-screen three-projector Cinerama process (a short-lived gimmick that paved the way for the IMAX format). Literally an all-star presentation - featuring at least two dozen of Tinseltown's A-list players - with the legendary John Ford among the directors, the Hollywood blockbuster, following three generations of a pioneer family, from the Erie Canal westward to Arizona, was divided into five chapters. In a pointed strategy to draw audiences away from their living room TV sets (a crucial contention at the time), each segment was designed to exploit breathtaking action scenes that would have been dwarfed by living room cathode tubes.

For crying out loud, even a setting as simplistic as dancehall singer
Debbie Reynolds' "dressing room" became an exercise in orgiastic
excess for set designers to accommodate the fish-eye, three-camera
Cinerama process in "How the West Was Won." Co-director Henry
Hathaway was overheard carping, "That damn Cinerama - do you
know a waist shot is as close as you can get with that thing?"

The railroad expansion sequence in "How the West Was Won," dramatizing the eastward construction of the Central Pacific and that of the westward bound Union Pacific, featured a snarling Richard Widmark as a pigheaded railroad baron who willfully violates a treaty by intruding on Arapaho territory. In retaliation, the Native Americans unleash a buffalo stampede through the railroad camp, decimating men, women, children, and infants, and, in what was supposed to be a show-stopping stunt, toppling the railway water tower.

"They just sent a bunch of animals to kill an animal
they call the iron horse!"

Three veteran Hollywood stuntmen - Harvey Parry, Joe Yrigoyen, and Troy Melton - were poised at the top of the water tower. An off-camera bulldozer was to push the structure over. Several cardboard boxes with pads were placed in position on the ground for the stuntmen to land safely. According to some accounts, when the bulldozer began pushing the tower, water splashed back on the driver, who panicked and threw the vehicle into reverse, causing the tower to collapse short of its intended position and the stuntmen to miss the boxes.

Harvey Lancaster, a game warden who worked at Custer State Park in South Dakota, where the buffalo scenes in "How the West Was Won" were filmed, claimed he was the bulldozer driver. "That was me on a D8 Cat," he recalled. "I told them you don't have the boxes far enough out there, but they wouldn't listen to me." Harvey Parry broke both heels, and the other two stuntmen also suffered broken bones. After recuperating, all three were back at work, however Parry's injuries limited him to mostly acting. In the mid-1960s sitcom "F Troop," Parry played the recurring character of the town drunk, Charlie, the "fastest drunk in the West." Captain Parmenter (Ken Berry) boasts, "We were lucky to get him - Dodge had a spare."

Historically, isolated water stops became a favorite ambush location for train robbers, as depicted in numerous westerns. In the midst of the iconoclastic 1969 western "The Wild Bunch," bookended by the slow-motion ballets of bloodletting at the failed bank robbery and at the final shootout in Agua Verde, director Sam Peckinpah staged a subtle set-piece of exhilaratingly orchestrated filmmaking, depicting the methodical robbery of weapons from a U.S. Army train at a water stop by the outlaws working for a corrupt Mexican general - beginning with the clever ruse of a bandit hiding in the tower's water spout and ending with a spectacular collapse of a bridge bearing the pursuing posse.

Director Sam Peckinpah steps lively on the set of "The Wild Bunch."

Upon its release, "The Wild Bunch" stirred a lot of controversy and garnered much condemnation for its graphic violence, much of it photographed in seemingly adoring slow-motion. Another action-packed western from that same year, 1969's "100 Rifles," created controversy of its own by featuring interracial love scenes between Jim Brown, as an Arizona lawman, and Raquel Welch, as a Yaqui revolutionary named Sarita. Relatively early in his screen career, Burt Reynolds portrayed a charming half-breed bandit called Yaqui Joe. (Allegedly part Cherokee himself, Reynolds played the half-Comanche blacksmith Quint in the series "Gunsmoke," the title fugitive outlaw in the spaghetti western "Navajo Joe," and a full-blooded Iroquois police detective in TV's "Hawk.")

Having retired from professional football in 1966 after nine seasons as a fullback for the Cleveland Browns, Jim Brown had already established himself as a formidable screen presence with supporting roles in "Rio Conchos," "The Dirty Dozen," and "Ice Station Zebra" by the time he was cast in "100 Rifles." While filming a fight scene with Burt Reynolds atop a cliff, Brown remarked that he wasn't fond of being so close to the steep precipice, to which Reynolds replied, "If we fall, the newspapers will say, 'Jim Brown and unknown actor die.'"

In one of the film's many action sequences,Yaqui rebels led by Reynolds and Brown take over the train belonging to evil Mexican General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas) while Sarita (Welch) distracts the federal troops by taking a daytime shower beneath the water tower of a railway stop wearing only a flimsy shirt (pictured above).

Raquel's trackside shower became a major selling
point in posters for "100 Rifles," which was, for
some reason, titled "El Verdugo" (the name of
Fernando Lamas' character) for Italian theaters.
"Verdugo," by the way, means "executioner" in Spanish.

With a title like "The Train Robbers," noteworthy as the sole screen pairing of John Wayne and Ann-Margret but otherwise a lethargic saddle-sore western - forgettable immediately upon viewing - the 1973 film had to at least throw in a shot of a railroad water stop, which it did...

Perhaps thinking about his recent Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
"The Last Picture Show," ranch hand-rodeo cowboy-turned-actor
Ben Johnson pauses to reflect on the set of "The Train Robbers."
(And no, we don't know if that's an extra or an errant crew member
hanging out in the water tower...)

A more modern utilization of the railway water stop, and possibly the most familiar to nostalgic TV viewers, was the water tower near the fictional Shady Rest Hotel on the 1960s sitcom "Petticoat Junction."

Created by Paul Henning, the executive producer of "The Beverly Hillbillies" and later creator of "Green Acres," the rural hotel was the home of the lovely Bradley siblings, Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo, and Betty Jo. No matter the changes in the cast, the girls would be there in the opening credits in their makeshift tub with petticoats demurely draped over the side.

The first two seasons of "Petticoat Junction" found Linda Kaye
Henning playing Betty Jo, Pat Woodell as Bobbie Jo,
and Jeannine Riley as Billie Jo.

The 3rd season cast included Linda Kaye Henning as Betty Jo,
Lori Saunders as Bobbie Jo, and Gunilla Hutton as Billie Jo.

From season four to the end of the series after seven seasons,
Linda Kaye Henning and Lori Saunders remained as Betty Jo
and Bobbie Jo, with Meredith MacRae portraying Billie Jo.
Not surprisingly, the one constant among the siblings, Linda
Kaye Henning, was producer-creator Paul Henning's daughter.

Not to be outdone by the girls of Hooterville, grade-Z movie auteur Fred Olen Ray plopped busty blonde exploitation starlet J.J. North ("Vampire Vixens from Venus," "Bikini Hotel") in a wooden tub - with nary a petticoat in sight - in 1995's "Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold," a cheesy parody of the 1958 cult chestnut "Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman."

An old-fashioned water tower was put to dramatic use in a contemporary setting in the 1990 film "Tremors," a spirited, affectionate throwback to creature features of the '50s, as a handful of citizens in the almost-ghost town of Perfection contend with oversized, tentacled subterranean monstrosities dubbed "graboids." The popular tongue-in-cheek thriller, which starred Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter, Michael Gross, and Reba McEntire, spawned three direct-to-video sequels, a video prequel, and a 13-episode TV series; "Tremors 6" is scheduled for a 2018 release.

Trapped on the rooftops by the vibration-sensitive monsters, the human prey distract the graboids by releasing water from the tower to give Kevin Bacon the opportunity to link up a 30-ton Caterpillar bulldozer to a hefty semi trailer for a hasty evacuation of the endangered homestead.

The water tower remained a noticeable set piece in the "Tremors" franchise, even when the hole-in-the-wall settlement was called Rejection in the 2004 prequel "Tremors 4: The Legend Begins," which depicts the genesis of the man-eating graboids in an Old West setting when a hot spring hatches a handful of eggs in a silver mine.

The modern use of water towers started developing during the middle of the 19th century as steam pumping became common. The Louisville Water Tower (pictured below), located east of the downtown Kentucky metropolis near the waterfront, is the oldest ornamental water tower in the world. Prior to the tower's construction in 1860, Louisville had earned the derogatory nickname "Graveyard of the West" due to the epidemic levels of cholera and typhoid fever caused by the residents' reliance on tainted water from private wells. Resembling a Greek temple complex, the tower and adjacent pumping station ceased operations in 1909.

When the famed - and infamous - Irish-born British playwright and poet Oscar Wilde toured America in 1882, he remarked that the Chicago Water Tower (pictured below), the second oldest water tower in the U.S., looked like "a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it."

Erected in 1869, the tower was the only public building in the burn zone to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Currently utilized as an art gallery by the Chicago Office of Tourism, the structure's castle-like design allegedly inspired many White Castle fast food buildings.

The Marston Water Tower (pictured below) on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa - at 168 feet - was the first elevated steel water tower west of the Mississippi.

The decision to erect the tower, named for its designer and Iowa State's first dean of engineering, Anson Marston, came in 1895, a year after a severe water shortage forced the cancellation of college classes. The use of the water tower was discontinued in 1978 when the university adopted the city water system. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, the tower was restored in 1987 and was named an "American Water Landmark" in 2007.

Union, New Jersey, is the home of what has been hailed as the world's tallest water sphere (pictured below). An eye-catching landmark since its construction in 1964, the 212-foot tall Union Watersphere holds 250,000 gallons of water. A former Union resident dedicated a "museum" to the iconic tower at his home in, of all places, Austin, Texas.

Just as visionary architects have strived to create water towers that were more than functional, inspired filmmakers have frequently used water towers as more than backdrops

There must be something about a roadside water tower that speaks of Americana. When Percy Adlon, a prominent voice in the so-called New German Cinema of the 1970s and '80s - a movement that included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders - came to America to film the enchanting truck stop fable "Bagdad Cafe" (1987) in California's Mojave Desert, he specifically focused on the comparatively lofty water tower (pictured below).

Bavarian-born actress Marianne Sägebrecht portrayed a German tourist who abandons her husband after an argument and wanders to the isolated cafe and motel, run by a seemingly short-tempered woman (CCH Pounder), whose own husband is moving out. The lonely foreigner is allowed to perform various chores at the desolate roadside stopover and gradually transforms the lives of its denizens, including an eccentric ex-Hollywood set painter, charmingly played with a wicked twinkle in his eye by Jack Palance.
      .

In one of cinema's quirkiest buddy films, Bavarian-born Marianne
Sägebrecht embraces Guyanese-American actress CCH Pounder.

In his review of the 1993 sleeper "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," Roger Ebert noted, "In the small, eventful world of Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp), emergencies are a natural state." The film is set in a sleepy back-pocket Iowa town fictionally called Endora, where Gilbert's 500-pound mother, in Ebert's words, "spends days at a time just sitting on the sofa," while his mentally challenged younger brother, played by Leonardo DiCaprio "has a way of climbing the town water tower and forgetting how to get back down."

Although the picture was set in a make-believe Iowa community,
"What's Eating Gilbert Grape's" filmmakers went to Manor, Texas,
to photograph the water tower scenes.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in only his fourth film, earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his personally researched of the troubled brother; Film Review magazine thought he brought "a touching credibility to a very difficult part," praising his "performance of astonishing innocence and spontaneity."

The water tower in Wakita, Oklahoma (pictured above), or, more importantly, its environs, just south of the Kansas border, were featured prominently in the 1996 springtime blockbuster thriller "Twister." In the film, Meg, the convivial aunt of Helen Hunt's character, lives in Wakita, where her home is destroyed.

We're not sure of the hours, but Wakita, Oklahoma,
is the home of Twister The Movie Museum.

Aunt Meg was played by Lois Smith, who made her screen debut in 1955's "East of Eden," directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean. She was singled out as Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics for her role as Jack Nicholson's sister in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces."

Seven years before joining the Fellowship of the Ring, teenaged Elijah Wood costarred with Kevin Costner in the family drama "The War" (1994), directed by Jon Avnet ("Fried Green Tomatoes"). In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Set in a small Mississippi town and centered on a children's battle over a tree house, 'The War' is an allegory about love, death, pacifism, family values and the spiritual and physical wounds of the Vietnam War." Looming over the story, as imposing as the magnificent tree house, is a towering water tank (pictured below), which Wood has to perilously ascend to retrieve the key to the besieged tree house.

Roger Ebert noted, "Elijah Wood has emerged, I believe, as the
most talented actor in his age group in Hollywood history."

It was Roger Ebert who dismissed 2008's "Jumper" - a nonsensical science fiction adventure about some guy who can inexplicably transport himself instantaneously from one geographical location to another - as "a movie so silly you may find yourself giggling even as you wish you could magically transport yourself almost anywhere in the world but where you are, in front of the screen showing it."

Hayden Christensen (pictured above), a Canadian actor who personally sabotaged the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy as the brooding Anakin Skywalker, still broods a lot in this movie, sometimes atop the water tower in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he goes to think about stuff; except, for whatever reason, the filmmakers did some "jumping" of their own, and plopped Christensen on a water tower in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (pictured below), over 300 miles northeast of Ann Arbor.

A 2011 science fiction film that got everything right, "Super 8" - a nostalgic labor of love written and directed by J..J. Abrams ("Star Trek," "Star Wars: The Force Awakens") and produced by that champion of childhood wonder, Steven Spielberg - utilized a water tower as an important plot point in its wide-eyed ,"Goonies" take on an alien invasion (pictured below, in an artist's conception).

In 2013's "Iron Man 3," evil Marvel Comics henchman Savin (played by James Badge Dale) attempts to dispatch Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) by bringing down the water tower in Rose Hill, North Carolina (pictured below - before and after).

A water tower figured prominently in a later Marvel Entertainment offering, 2017's "Logan," the 10th "X-Men" installment and the third and final Wolverine solo project for star Hugh Jackman (pictured below), who has played James "Logan" Howlett/Wolverine for 17 years. In the film, Logan appropriates a dilapidated, collapsed water tower as a hideout for an infirm Professor X (Patrick Stewart). The feeble X-Men founder has lost control of his telepathic powers, so Logan keeps him drugged with the hope that the tower blocks his mentor's brain waves.

A chorus line of geriatric action stars - Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, and, among others, Arnold Schwarzenegger - take on armies of bad guys in Nepal or Bulgaria or wherever in 2012's "The Expendables 2." In one orgiastic firefight, after Stallone and Jason Statham shish-kabob an enemy chopper with an airborne motorcycle, Terry Crewes singlehandedly shoots down a water tower, wiping out a unit of foot soldiers in a deluge (pictured below).

The county seat of Taliaferro, Georgia, is the tiny town of Crawfordville, population 572 at the 2000 census. Hollywood moviemakers have used the financially strapped community as a favorite backdrop for 40 years, mainly because it seems frozen in time as the ideal Southern small town, from the made-for-television films "Summer of My German Soldier" (1978), starring Kristy McNichol, Bruce Davison, and Esther Rolle, "Coward of the County" (1981), featuring Kenny Rogers, and "Paris Trout" (1991), with Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey, to the theatrical features "Gorp" (1980), with Dennis Quaid and Fran Drescher, "Stars and Bars" (1988), starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Harry Dean Stanton, and "Get Low" (2009), featuring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray.

When director Andy Tennant used Crawfordville, Georgia, as a location for the fictional town of Pigeon Creek in the 2002 romantic comedy "Sweet Home Alabama," starring Reese Witherspoon, the filmmakers erected a water tower on the site of a long since departed structure (that's the rebuilt water tower in the above photo).

(Pictured above) The water tower constructed as a location for
"Sweet Home Alabama" was subsequently dismantled when
the filming ended.

In 2009, as the community prepared for the filming of "Get Low," which included only a few dozen roles for local extras, compared to 300 in "Sweet Home Alabama," the mayor of Crawfordville, Herman Milner, said that although the town's renown as a popular movie site is a point of pride, that doesn't translate into dollar signs for the area. "It has very little impact on the local economy," Milner commented. "But it's good if it gives a couple of local citizens a couple of days' worth of work...There's a general enthusiasm about it."

Although technically not a movie with a water tower but meriting mention here is 1974's "The Towering Inferno," the all-star disaster flick about a fire that breaks out on the 81st floor of a colossal 138-story skyscraper in San Francisco during a dedication party. Produced by Irwin Allen, once Hollywood's reigning king of disaster pictures ("The Poseidon Adventure," "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure," "The Swarm"), the overblown melodrama top-lined Steve McQueen and Paul Newman as the fire department battalion chief and the architect who risk their lives to blow up the water tanks atop the building with plastic explosives and unleash a million gallons of water to extinguish the conflagration.

In one of the silliest publicity photos in Hollywood history, the cast
of "The Towering Inferno" - Steve McQueen, Robert Wagner, Faye
Dunaway, William Holden, Jennifer Jones, Fred Astaire, Paul
Newman, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Vaughn, and O.J. Simpson -
prance through the studio backlot as if promoting a gala musical.

Firefighting experts, architecture experts, and electrical experts have repeatedly singled out the movie's glut of technical errors and jaw-dropping implausibilities, not the least of which is that such a building could not possibly support the weight of tanks holding a million gallons of water. Most rooftop water tanks contain no more 25,000 gallons.

More entertaining than the picture's catalog of improbabilities, however, was the behind-the-scenes squabbling between the camps of the blue-eyed Kings of Cool, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. On the occasion of the only screen pairing of the rival superstars at the height of their careers (McQueen had a bit part in Newman's first starring role in 1956's "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), McQueen demanded and fastidiously ensured that he and Newman had the exact same number of lines. Newman grumbled that McQueen's character didn't make his entrance until 45 minutes into the picture, by which time Newman had already used up half his dialogue! The quibbling carried over into the positioning of the names on the movie poster. Yes, McQueen's name appears first from the left-hand margin, but Newman's is first from the top margin (note that Newman's picture is even higher than McQueen's). Poor William Holden and Faye Dunaway got lost in the shuffle, although Holden initially demanded top billing.

Water towers were once a common sight at the major motion picture and television studios throughout the Los Angeles area. Studios operated much like small, independent cities, with their own power generators, water supply, fire departments, even police departments. The towers once held water for such emergencies as fighting fire, but some are now simply nonfunctional landmarks, emblazoned with the studio name and logo.

In the 1990s the familiar Warner Bros. water tower (pictured above) served as the home for the animated "Warner" siblings Yakko, Wakko, and Dot in the TV series "Animaniacs" (pictured below), created by Tom Ruegger ("Tiny Toon Adventures," "Pinky and the Brain") and executive produced by Steven Spielberg.

Actually, the Warner Bros. water tower has been listed on a number of top ten coolest water towers in the world. Others on similar lists include the Brooks Catsup Bottle Water Tower in Collinsville, Illinois, constructed in 1949 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Peachoid, a 135-foot tall water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina, was built of steel and concrete in 1981 and holds one million gallons of water. Referred to as "The Peach" and "Mr. Peach," passing motorists sometimes call it "The Moon Over Gaffney," possibly because of its resemblance to an ample portion of human anatomy.

Interestingly the Peachoid became the focal point of an episode of the Netflix series "House of Cards," in which there was concern over the structure's resemblance to a vagina. The character of Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), as a native of Gaffney, keeps a photo of the Peachoid in his office.

Kevin Spacey once tweeted a photo of himself and
his dog, Boston, at the Peachoid to celebrate
an Emmy nomination.

In Honolulu, Hawaii, the eye-catching pineapple water tower was constructed in 1927 to serve the Dole cannery. Sadly, as a result of wear over time and corporate priorities, the tower was demolished in 1993.

Bringing this back to our hometown of Rochester, Minnesota, a frequent addition to several top ten lists of the coolest, or most interesting, or weirdest water towers is the Ear of Corn Water Tower, initially erected in 1931 for the Libby's canned food facility and later assimilated by Seneca Foods.

The 60-foot high landmark, often mistakenly called the Corn Cob Water Tower (see below), holds 50,000 gallons of water.

This is a corn cob...

This is an ear of corn.

By the way, the Ear of Corn Water Tower has been praised by agriculturists as being botanically correct, as far as the number of rows of kernels are concerned.

Not far from the iconic Ear of Corn is another familiar landmark for residents, the water tower that looms above the parking lot of the Apache Mall shopping center. Recently, city planners, in an attempt to thwart transitory turkey vultures that defecate atop the imposing edifice, placed a red wind dancer on the top of the tower as an inflatable scarecrow.

,
Piping rock music to the top of the tower proved ineffectual, as did the recorded sounds of screeching, predatory hawks, and the vultures had grown used to a white wind dancer.  A spokesperson for the city public utilities admitted, "It's messy, it dries on the tower, and it's hard to clean. When you're going that high, it takes time and money to get up there and clean it.


Preview of Coming Attractions (with a thanks to Tracy Sonnier)

Next stop in the Moviehouse: Films About Moontowers: Beyond "Dazed and Confused." A phenomenon frequently found in Texas, moonlight towers, used to illuminate dark stretches of towns, were common in the 1880s and 1890s.

If not for such memorable lines as "All right, all right, all right," and, "That's what I love about these high school girls, man, I get older, they stay the same age," Matthew McConaughey, in his first major screen role as David Wooderson in "Dazed and Confused," should be revered for announcing, "Party at the moontower!"

"Imagine how many people out there right now
are f---in', man!"