Call it a sign of the times. In early 2005, a billboard which, for over 40 years had beckoned eastbound travelers on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to visit the "Town of Motels," was torn down, replaced with a modern board which now sports the vinyl query, "Got Gas?."

The Sign had originally been erected and maintained by the Breezewood Tourist Association, which, according to Dennis Tice, Director of the Bedford County Visitors Bureau, was once a very active group of mostly local merchants and property owners.

"Over time," he said, "More and more of the businesses have been bought by people who don't live in the area, and the Tourist Association became less active." The famous gateway sign, along with two others, were taken over in September of 2004 by the BCVB, who decided it was time to make a change.    

Off Interstate 45 about 20 miles south of Dallas, a man named Martin Murray has built a time machine: one that could possibly take Jacksonville movie patrons back more than 50 years.

Murray is part owner of Galaxy Drive-In movie theater, a museum to a mostly extinct industry - extinct, at least, in Jacksonville since around 1976, when the Chief drive-in closed.

The Chief was located off the Rusk Highway at the old underpass just outside the city limits then, now roundabout where Beall's department store sits.

Auburn, Washington

The day after she turned 16, Rosetta Beyersdorf, then a student at Auburn High School, walked down the street to Cubby's Drive-In, put on a uniform she says made her ``look like a nurse'' and went to work.

"It was 1966,'' she recalls. "You had to be 16 to go work.''

It was the era before the advent of so many fast food chains.

Besides Cubby's, she says, ``there was the Triple X, which is now Big Daddy's, and the A&W at the other end of Auburn.

"I worked six days a week. I went to work after school. We closed at 11. I got home after midnight.''

Saco, Main. Maine's oldest drive-in theater, which opened 67 years ago, is facing an uncertain future.

The Saco Drive-In is located on a stretch of busy Route 1 that's become crowded with car dealerships and other businesses. The value of the site is expected to soar when sewer lines are extended near the property.

If, by some quirk of fate you happen to be looking for a replica of the Eiffel Tower, your search is over. Irene Brunette has one sitting in two pieces in the basement of her Moon home.

She also has a steamboat, a barn, rotating dice, a light-up clown, a doll- house, a wishing well, a paddle-wheel house, two castles, two windmills, a water wheel, a lighthouse, a chalet and an oil derrick -- all with enough bells and whistles to amuse both young and old.

Brunette is not a collector of unusual objects, just the keeper of the items which, if laid out properly, will form an 18-hole miniature golf course. Her late husband, Samuel, handcrafted the obstacles over a 20-year period. They are made of chrome-plated brass and heavy aluminum, have never been used and, thanks to Brunette's attention, remain pristine and smudge free.

I may be mistaken (and I hope I am!) but I think the Town of Motels sign, advertising Breezewood, PA, is history. I don't want to be alarmist, but as I breezed along "America's first superhighway" last weekend, I came around a familiar bend, and I saw a sign...only it wasn't the one I expected.

Now, at my advanced age, this may be a hallucination. Maybe it wasn't the turn I though it was. Maybe it wasn't the sign. Maybe. I'd appreciate clarification from other American Roadside fans....

The Sign has been in ill repair for a couple of years...but I never thought I'd see it go. Sigh.

Tell me it ain't so, Joe....

Being that it's his movie, it was only fitting for Garrison Keillor to be the first actor to show up at Mickey's Diner in downtown St. Paul Saturday evening.

As Keillor walked by the small crowd that had gathered to see what all the fuss was about, Mike Hardin, 20, an autograph seeker, whipped out a 1980 vinyl copy of "The Prairie Home Companion Anniversary Album."

"Where'd you get this?" Keillor asked, as he signed the album cover with a blue marker. "I hope you didn't pay full price for it." The radio legend was in a jovial mood as filming for "A Prairie Home Companion," a Hollywood movie about the fictional last broadcast of his famous radio show -- left the Fitzgerald Theater for a night. Every other scene has been shot in the downtown theater, where Keillor regularly performs his radio show.

It took the city two years, several court orders and possibly more than $1 million to get its hands on the land now occupied by the downtown Belmont Beverage store. Now the city has decided it doesn’t want to build a hotel at Jefferson Boulevard and Harrison Street after all, raising several timely questions about government’s proper power over private property.

To city planners, moving the site of a third downtown hotel to the north side of the newly expanded Grand Wayne Convention Center — perhaps to the corner now occupied by Cindy’s Diner — will better promote the redevelopment of Harrison Street, The Landing historic district and Fort Wayne’s riverbanks. To others, however, the change of heart illustrates the dangers posed by the use of eminent domain – dangers some City Council members want to curb.