Road Trip
Are we there yet?
When my sister and I were growing up, my parents’ idea of a great vacation was to pack us all into the family car and drive for many hours, or sometimes even days, to a destination that was of no interest to us kids. Typically we just drove to the home of some friends of theirs from years ago. Our parents always scheduled vacations at the end of August, when tourist accommodations were cheaper and whatever tourist attractions our destination offered were already winding down for the year.
Unlike today’s kids, we had no computer games, cellphones, or portable music players to relieve the hours of boredom sitting in the back seat of the car with nothing to do. My sister would start asking “Are we there yet” before we were barely out of New Jersey.
I found I got car sick if I tried to read or work on a book of puzzles while the car was in motion. Going back to school — the place we had called “jail” as recently as the preceding June — started to look really good.
The US Highway System Then and Now
In the decade after WWII, we lived in the greater NYC area of New Jersey. The Interstate highway system didn’t exist. If you have a recent road map of the Northeast, mentally erase the Interstates and then see how you would go to any place several states away from New Jersey. If, for example, you wanted to go up or down the eastern seaboard to, say, Maine or Florida, you’d probably have to use the old, beat-up US Route 1, a 2,369-mile-long strip mall with traffic lights every 500 yards.
Minnesota and Iowa
Our longest road trip took us out to Duluth, Minnesota, then to Waterloo, Iowa, and finally back home. One of Mom’s college pals had moved with her family from New Jersey to Minnesota, and neighbors from down the street in our town in New Jersey had moved out to Iowa. I still admire the bonds of friendship that motivated my parents to make these long road trips to see their friends and motivated their friends to have our whole family as guests for several days.
Off to a Promising Start
The first part of this trip started off well enough since the New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio Turnpikes had all been completed. These limited-access highways were a major innovation of the postwar era. Hundreds of miles flew by and the scenery was constantly changing.
Ohio
We stopped overnight at the “Dorma Dell” motel in Ohio. This was one of the “modern” motels that began appearing after the war. Americans were increasingly traveling by car and expected accommodations better than the “tourist cabins” of the prewar era, which were little more than shacks. We had often stayed in cabins during earlier trips.
The typical tourist cabin interior lacked drywall (not to mention insulation) and had primitive plumbing. I remember the “pillows” on the beds in the cabins were pillow slips stuffed with shredded newspaper.
The picture below is from a promotional postcard distributed by Dorma Dell at the motel office. The card is from 1953, which is when we would have stayed there.
After we had settled into our nice new motel room, the manager’s son stopped by and asked me if I’d like to play baseball. I agreed, and we headed out to the field behind the motel. The boy had apparently rounded up enough kids from among the motel visitors and his friends to make up two full teams. Like most American boys, we knew how this would go. We quickly picked sides and began playing. In traditional sandlot fashion, we played until it was too dark to continue.
Indiana
As we drove out of Ohio into Indiana the next day, the view out the car windows became increasingly uniform and boring. It was just mile after mile of corn fields. Occasionally the monotony was broken up by something I’d never seen before: Burma Shave ads. These were a sequence of five panels spaced far enough apart that you could easily read each panel as you drove by at highway speed. The only one I remember is this:
In this vale
of toil and sin
your head grows bald
but not your chin.
Burma Shave
Not a bad little bit of verse! This is one of just two verses preserved at https://www.legendsofamerica.com/66-burmashave/
Illinois and Wisconsin
After Indiana, we drove into Illinois and then into Wisconsin. As a kid from the so-called ”Garden State,” I was surprised at how much of the land here was devoted to agriculture and how few different crops there were: basically just different varieties of corn, most of which was raised to feed pigs. At home in New Jersey we could go to any of the farm stands in town and get apples, pears, peaches, watermelons, lettuce, and tomatoes, as well as local eggs and honey.
Minnesota at last
I’ve written in The Memoirist before about our stay in Minnesota (I Almost Became a Geologist). Our hosts there had planned lots of activities for both the parents and the kids. In addition to tours of the Iron Range, the huge railroad marshaling yards, and the ore boat docks, we spent a day at a park with a swimming pool near the airbase of the 148th Fighter Wing. As a devoted aviation buff, I was less interested in swimming than in watching the continuous stream of F-86 Sabre jets taking off and landing. This was during the Korean War, so I suspect I was seeing combat pilots in training.
Our hosts arranged a boat ride on Lake Superior. At the docks that day in Superior, Wisconsin, the waves were surprisingly high, which made it difficult just to board the boat. As the boat moved out into the lake, the waves became more and more violent. The captain finally decided to turn around and head back to port. But it was too late for me. We had had egg salad sandwiches for lunch, most of which I “hurled” overboard. To this day I can’t eat egg salad. I gag just thinking about it.
On to Iowa
After Minnesota, we headed south to Iowa. Again it was miles and miles of nothing but corn fields punctuated by Burma Shave ads. When we arrived at our host’s property in Iowa it turned out to be just more cornfields. Even though our host was an engineer who designed farm equipment for International Harvester, he had several acres of corn growing in fields around the house. It seemed that whatever you did for a living in Iowa, you also grew corn.
The “highlight” of our time in Iowa was a visit to “The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood,” which is the subject of a well-known hymn. Seriously, that was it.
A few years later our hosts moved back to New Jersey. This time they settled in Hunterdon County, known as the “Highlands of New Jersey.” Several of the hills there rise over 1000’, which is relatively high for the state and, obviously, quite a contrast to Iowa.
The Later Years
As my sisters and I got older, Mom and Dad stopped making road trips. Part of the reason must have been that they had simply outlived the friends they used to visit. Dad lived to be 102, Mom to 90. Over the years, three different generations of friends had come into their lives and then passed away. In their later years, they switched to conventional travel on cruises and scheduled airlines.
The Generation After
None of us kids picked up on my parents’ road trip-style vacationing. But I’m glad I had the experience. For several weeks I was immersed in the life of “flyover country,” which Northeasterners like me might never visit. There’s a whole other world out there between the coasts.
By Stuart Smith
