COLUMBUS. Ohio--- Mid-century Los Angeles hipsters Jimmy Bryant and Wesley "Speedy" West recorded the instrumental "West of Samoa" in 1955. The track is a intergalatic mash-up of Hawaiian steel, exotica bird chirps and country-jazz guitar.
This America was about endless possibility.
You go as far as the road takes you.

West was a steel guitarist flash who was delivered from the Ozarks, specifically the country mecca of Springfield, Mo. Bryant was the oldest of 12 kids from a sharecropper's family in Southern Georgia.
They met in the country-western honky tonks of L.A.'s skid row........

MESA THEN

MESA NOW

MESA, Az.---Every winter when I settle into Mesa for a few days the growth of the Sonoran Desert city blows my mind.
The spring training home of the Chicago Cubs has 467,000 residents; more than Miami, Fla. or St. Louis, Mo.
When the Cubs new $84 million baseball complex opens in late 2013 in Mesa, it pretty much will be a year-round facility used for organizational meetings, draft day events and long rehabs for Aramis Ramirez.
The complex will be near the Riverview Mall at the intersection of freeways 101 and 202. More than 200,000 cars a day drive through this juncture.
"It's the geographic center of the valley," Mesa Mayor Scott Smith told me a couple weeks ago........

Marie Wuczynski, one in a million (Sun-Times photo)

Marie Wuczynski had a favorite number on the jukebox of the venerable Marie's Rip Tide, 1745 W. Armitage.
She inherited the song when she bought the Bucktown bar in 1961. Mrs. Wuczynski died Monday of congestive heart failure in her home above the bar. She was 88.

Mrs. Wuczynski would often go to sleep after listening to number 120 on the juke. That song was "Melody of Love," with 1940s era WGN all-night radio personality Franklyn MacCormack reading a poem with the Wayne King Orchestra playing a waltz. In his profound baritone MacCormack said: