Time Traveling: ROUTE 66
By Kathy Harlan
My parents were schoolteachers. That gave them
the luxury of free time in the summer but little money
to spend on vacations. We traveled anyway and saw
most of the United States before I went off to college
in 1956. My sister Ginny and I shared the back seat
and she usually rode with her feet sticking out the
window, causing me great embarrassment.
We picnicked often, but occasionally stopped at a
restaurant for dinner where, for fifty cents, we could feast on a hot roast
beef sandwich or fried chicken. Roadside attractions – the headless
alligator, the monster snake, the homemade taffy – were beyond our
means. Every historical marker was given due attention, however,
since they were free.
There were seven of us in the car one summer when we traveled
from Oklahoma to California. Our luggage was tied on top of the car
and on the running board, and a water bag was draped across the
radiator. I was assigned the seat in the back next to Grandpa Jarrel.
He dipped snuff and between his feet he kept a small spittoon, which
tipped over frequently, depositing the thick, black, foul liquid on the
floor. The heat and the smell were nauseating. We crossed the Mojave
Desert into California on Highway 66 and broke down in Needles,
feeling like the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath. It was undoubtedly the
most miserable road trip of my life.
In the early days of car travel, people unexpectedly dropped in on each other. After a welcoming hug we were offered a drink of water
from a glass jar in the icebox. Everyone was poor but dinner was usually
offered. If the pantry was empty, the hostess would go in the yard, wring
the neck of an unlucky chicken, pick a vegetable or open something
she had canned, make biscuits from flour, shortening and water, and
a banquet would appear on the table. When evening approached we
were often invited to spend the night. We would lay out blankets on
the floor and sleep on a pallet, hoping there were
not many spiders or mice.
Wall Drug Store was the highlight of one trip.
Opened in 1931 at the edge of the South Dakota
badlands, the store’s owners wondered how to
attract visitors to such a remote and unappealing
location. Wall had 326 poor people and few visitors.
Then the owners had the brilliant idea of offering
free ice water to travelers, and the more brilliant
idea of advertising it nationwide on roadside signs.
“Only 768 miles to Wall Drug Store” the handmade
sign might read. And folks like us would go 200
miles out of the way to visit Wall and get a free glass
of ice water and maybe an ice cream cone.
On our cross- country trips, we enjoyed one of the great marketing
programs of all time. It saturated narrow, rough roads all across the
country with sets of five small signs, usually about driving safely. The
first four signs contained lines of a couplet (Speed was High, Weather
was Hot, Tires Were Thin, X Marks the Spot) or (The Midnight Ride,
of Paul for Beer, Led to a Warmer, Atmosphere.) The fifth sign said
Burma Shave, probably the most recognizable business name in the
country. What excitement it was to happen upon a new verse along
the road. What a marketer wouldn’t give now for such a successful ad
campaign. (They were all removed in 1963.)
We drove into New York City and, like millions of other smalltowners,
gasped in awe at the vista of unending skyscrapers. Ginny’s
feet still hung out the car window but were ignored by the swarming
pedestrians except for one drunk who shouted “Hello, foot!” A seedy
hotel near Times Square was our home for two nights and my sister and
I were treated to tickets for the garish “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”
In the Midwest we shared an underground storm shelter with old
friends as a tornado swept by. We visited Calumet Farms and were
allowed to pet the heroic Seabiscuit shortly before he died. Although
we couldn’t afford tickets to The Grand Old Opry, we did walk through
the Ryman Auditorium. In Juarez, Mexico we were caught in a flash
flood and waded in knee-high water to get out. We followed a crude,
hand-lettered sign to a catfish “restaurant” in Georgia, which turned
out to be the back porch of a house. The meal arrived in about two
hours, after the hosts went to the river and caught, cleaned and fried
the unfortunate catfish. It was exciting to drive THROUGH the giant
tree in California’s Redwood Forest. We went to Centralia, Washington
to see Harry Truman wave from the caboose of a train on his 1948
whistle-stop tour.
One day in the early 1950s, a “big, beautiful, blue Buick” appeared
in front of our house. Three holes decorated each side, (the more
expensive Roadmaster had four holes). It was easily the most exciting
car we had ever had. Our best friends, a family of six, often piled in
the Buick with us, using the floor, window ledge and laps to make it
work. The ten of us drove 90 miles from the logging country of western
Washington to Seattle each year in that awkward configuration, and
begged to do it again. The destination was a Seattle Rainer’s baseball
game, a highlight of each summer.
By the time I left home, our family had visited every state but North
Dakota, Rhode Island, Alaska and Hawaii. We had seen most of the
country’s “Tourist Attractions” including the Alamo, The Statue of
Liberty, Carlsbad Caverns, the Corn Palace, Mammoth Cave, the
Hoover Dam and others with a reasonable ticket price.
A new era began when Disneyland opened just down the road from
our home in Southern California in 1955. Suddenly travel was not
about free ice water and pallets on the floor, but expensive tickets and
destination trips.
I remember the old-style travel with fondness, but I would choose
air-conditioning and Igloos full of ice over a spittoon in a hot car any
day.
