About the same time you were riding your bike, my parents were taking us on road trips in the west. Just about the only money they spent was for gas. We had one relative in Idaho where we could spend the night. Other than that, we would pull off the side of the road and throw out the blankets and sleep. One morning we woke up to find we were very close to the railroad tracks. Another time, deer were just a stone's throw away. One night the mosquitoes were so bad we packed up and drove farther. We would stop at Safeway every other day or so and buy a loaf of bread and some bologna. Maybe some oranges or apples. One time we passed a farm where they were harvesting peas. We drove in and picked up the bunches that had fallen off the truck. We shelled those peas in the back seat of the car while Daddy drove up the road. We took many trips up through Idaho and Yellowstone and into the Colombia River basin states without spending much money. I don't think people could do that nowadays.
This was wonderful, Lucian. It reminded me of my own epic trip across country when I was 17. The year was 1963. I had graduated (barely) from high school that Spring. My mother and young sister were gone from the house on an adventure that would take them around the world for months. My brother was home from college at Lehigh University in PA, and was busy with a Summer job. That left my father and me to rattle around in that old Tudor styled house in northern New Jersey by ourselves. Not a good scenario. We had not got along for years and this year was not looking to get any better, what with Rutgers University having already let it be known they were withdrawing the Approval for me to join their freshman class that Fall. Apparently my final grades at Ridgewood High overweighed any optimism on their part that my brilliant SAT scores may have initially sparked. Not that I was keen to go off to Rutgers anyway while my friends swanned off to the likes of Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. It wasn’t even the main campus, but the Newark extension. Ugh. So…after a succession of menial jobs around the house helping my father install insulation in the attic, painting, and the like I took a stint working at the Pied Piper ice cream plant in Paterson. There, one of my tasks was to wash the delivery trucks before they rolled out on their runs. My father had taken a job by that time at the plant as a driver, and I recall him being really pissed if I hadn’t gotten around to washing ‘his’ truck before he rolled. Truth to tell, I did my best and washed the trucks as instructed by my ‘straw boss’ in the order where they were parked. If I had to hunt around in the lot and find his particular truck, which may have been buried behind loads of others, my efficiency at this task would have been seriously impaired. Anyway….by August, I had enough of all this fol-de-rol and colluded with a friend in Long Island to go ‘On the Road’ out to California to visit his older brother who was an officer in the Marines and was stationed at Camp Pendleton. Our plan was to take my car - a ‘51 Studebaker. This my father absolutely refused to allow us to do. The car would never make the trip, he argued, and he didn’t like my contingency plan of just abandoning the old heap when it inevitably broke down and continuing the trip by thumb. Being as my friend Bob had already shown up in Ridgewood for we two to begin this big adventure, my counter-offer then was that we would hitch-hike. Amazingly, my dad agreed to that said he would give us our first ride and drive the two of us out to Route 17 in the morning right after breakfast! (My brother confided in me at some point, that our father never really excepted us to get far and that we would probably be back the following day, with our tails between our teen-aged legs.). In fact, by day’s end we had made it from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, then on to Ohio and across the state line into Indiana! I still recall some man on a Road Crew gang, seeing our cardboard hitch-hiking sign, as we stood on the side of the road in rural Ohio, remarking, “Boys! What’s round at both ends and high in the middle?” We were at a loss. “You’re holding it! Ha-ha!” It was our sign: ‘Ohio’. In any event we made it out to the west coast and down from northern Oregon all the way to Oceanside, California in a week, with numerous adventures along the way. There Bob’s brother had a house with two other Marine lieutenants just a couple of blocks from the beach. To be seventeen years old, and spending lazy summer days on a pristine California beach checking out all the ‘babes’ in 1963 after imagining about just this kind of thing for years was beyond my wildest dreams. After a week in southern Cal we hit the road again for the return trip, opting to take the southern route with a stop along the way to visit The Grand Canyon. That amazing place was so enticing to the two of us that we left our backpacks at some small hotel up on the South Rim and hiked down into the canyon, crossing the Colorado River on a little swing bridge by nightfall and spent the night at Phantom Ranch down on the floor of the canyon. We couldn’t afford to actually rent a room there (the box lunch we sprung for and split between us cost us a whopping $6, which was outrageous!) so we were just going to sleep on the bare ground until a cowboy got us spooked about scorpions and the like, so we slept on a couple of picnic tables. By the time we got back to Ridgewood three weeks after rolling out in Dad’s old Buick, we had gotten a total of 72 rides for the whole trip and covered about 7,000 miles. We arrived back with only 4 cents between the two of us. (LOL!) It was something that fulfilled a boyhood longing to go on a ‘Big Adventure’ that had been sparked many years earlier by having the tales of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer read to my brother and me as a child by my mother. And, no, the America that was back then is not what we have today, alas. About 6 weeks later I had signed up for the Air Force, so eager was I to get the hell out of the house. Now would begin some adventures of a different kind, including one year in Southeast Asia. But, that epic hitch-hiking trip of 1963 will forever be a highlight of my life. Thanks for reminding me of things we were able to do back then. :-)
Not a story, just an anecdote. We rode in late at night on our motorbikes. Our flimsy sleeping bags were not up to the mountain cold. We woke up half frozen. A grizzled elderly couple had made a fire for us. The wife reached into the flames and -with her bare hand!- withdrew a coffee pot and poured each of us a cup. I will never forget that cup of coffee.
I live in Amish country and they are now much more aware of what goes on elsewhere than they were when you encountered that family back then. One of the farmers in my county is the head of a consortium of farmers who pool their milk and sell the cheese in fancy shops in New York City and the Hamptons. But they still eschew connections to the outside world via electricity. Most of the farms around here have an "Amish phone booth" in a small shed away from the rest of the buildings. They are for making calls, not for receiving calls (although most of them have a way that callers can leave a message).
I had a 3 speed raleigh when I was a kid in Ga. the only one in the neighborhood. maybe 1961 or so. I still have it today. I was so cool for having that bike lol
Delightful story! Lucian, yours is an especially interesting one. You have made the story come alive. We need stories like this to remind us that life has its positive memories so that we don't get lost in the crazy-making circumstances of life. Your story reminds me of a couple of my own road trips.
While I was at Tennessee Tech, a group of three girlfriends and I took an unauthorized trip (we could not properly check out of the dorm unless we checked out "to go home.") Our plan was to go to Pensacola Beach, where one of the girls, Lulu, had a boyfriend with friends at the Navy training facility. We drove all day and all night and arrived in Pensacola by about noon. As soon as we got there, Lulu called her friend at Tennessee Tech to check in, only to be told that her mother had called because her grandfather had passed away. The friend told the mother that Lulu was on a trip to a local river beach and she would let her know as soon as she returned to the dorm (no cell phones in those days, thank goodness.) We loaded the car with our stuff and headed home without even meeting up with boyfriend and friends. Lulu managed to arrive home in time to make the funeral and her family was happy to see her there.
Another escapade took place while I was living in Atlanta, GA. One of my cousins in Wisconsin came down and she and I made a road trip to Daytona Beach, Florida. From my apartment in Atlanta, we left in my Monte Carlo. What a riotous trip. When my car developed some kind of problem, and we were stranded on the side of the road in our short shorts, we stood by the car with the hood up. A couple of helpful young guys stopped to help the maidens in distress. I have a picture of the guys working under the hood; they fixed the problem, and we were on our way. Arriving in Daytona, we met up with two of my cousin's friends and partied on with the guys.
I assume many people have memorable road trip stories from back in the day when such carefree inclinations were possible.
a captivating rambling tale. full of the fresh spirit of adventure of vagabond youth.
i recall plans made with my two 10th grade buddies to go orchard picking over the summer which dead-ended when their parents shut them down.
two years later tho, i used a work pass from the railway to go cross country to Montreal Expo86. i bought an old bread factory box van, and with sleeping bag and coleman stove, wandered back home across the prairies.
Wonderful adventure story. I drove from Boston to Taos in an ancient BW pop top. I could not drive over 50 mph. The truckers kept track of the little van and knew me in truck stops, everybody sweet and polite and talkative.
My god, what an epic trip that was! You had the best of all worlds when you could go across country by back roads and live to tell about it.
Damn, it was such a glorious time to be an American.
Thanks for bringing back the times we have lived through.
About the same time you were riding your bike, my parents were taking us on road trips in the west. Just about the only money they spent was for gas. We had one relative in Idaho where we could spend the night. Other than that, we would pull off the side of the road and throw out the blankets and sleep. One morning we woke up to find we were very close to the railroad tracks. Another time, deer were just a stone's throw away. One night the mosquitoes were so bad we packed up and drove farther. We would stop at Safeway every other day or so and buy a loaf of bread and some bologna. Maybe some oranges or apples. One time we passed a farm where they were harvesting peas. We drove in and picked up the bunches that had fallen off the truck. We shelled those peas in the back seat of the car while Daddy drove up the road. We took many trips up through Idaho and Yellowstone and into the Colombia River basin states without spending much money. I don't think people could do that nowadays.
This was wonderful, Lucian. It reminded me of my own epic trip across country when I was 17. The year was 1963. I had graduated (barely) from high school that Spring. My mother and young sister were gone from the house on an adventure that would take them around the world for months. My brother was home from college at Lehigh University in PA, and was busy with a Summer job. That left my father and me to rattle around in that old Tudor styled house in northern New Jersey by ourselves. Not a good scenario. We had not got along for years and this year was not looking to get any better, what with Rutgers University having already let it be known they were withdrawing the Approval for me to join their freshman class that Fall. Apparently my final grades at Ridgewood High overweighed any optimism on their part that my brilliant SAT scores may have initially sparked. Not that I was keen to go off to Rutgers anyway while my friends swanned off to the likes of Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. It wasn’t even the main campus, but the Newark extension. Ugh. So…after a succession of menial jobs around the house helping my father install insulation in the attic, painting, and the like I took a stint working at the Pied Piper ice cream plant in Paterson. There, one of my tasks was to wash the delivery trucks before they rolled out on their runs. My father had taken a job by that time at the plant as a driver, and I recall him being really pissed if I hadn’t gotten around to washing ‘his’ truck before he rolled. Truth to tell, I did my best and washed the trucks as instructed by my ‘straw boss’ in the order where they were parked. If I had to hunt around in the lot and find his particular truck, which may have been buried behind loads of others, my efficiency at this task would have been seriously impaired. Anyway….by August, I had enough of all this fol-de-rol and colluded with a friend in Long Island to go ‘On the Road’ out to California to visit his older brother who was an officer in the Marines and was stationed at Camp Pendleton. Our plan was to take my car - a ‘51 Studebaker. This my father absolutely refused to allow us to do. The car would never make the trip, he argued, and he didn’t like my contingency plan of just abandoning the old heap when it inevitably broke down and continuing the trip by thumb. Being as my friend Bob had already shown up in Ridgewood for we two to begin this big adventure, my counter-offer then was that we would hitch-hike. Amazingly, my dad agreed to that said he would give us our first ride and drive the two of us out to Route 17 in the morning right after breakfast! (My brother confided in me at some point, that our father never really excepted us to get far and that we would probably be back the following day, with our tails between our teen-aged legs.). In fact, by day’s end we had made it from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, then on to Ohio and across the state line into Indiana! I still recall some man on a Road Crew gang, seeing our cardboard hitch-hiking sign, as we stood on the side of the road in rural Ohio, remarking, “Boys! What’s round at both ends and high in the middle?” We were at a loss. “You’re holding it! Ha-ha!” It was our sign: ‘Ohio’. In any event we made it out to the west coast and down from northern Oregon all the way to Oceanside, California in a week, with numerous adventures along the way. There Bob’s brother had a house with two other Marine lieutenants just a couple of blocks from the beach. To be seventeen years old, and spending lazy summer days on a pristine California beach checking out all the ‘babes’ in 1963 after imagining about just this kind of thing for years was beyond my wildest dreams. After a week in southern Cal we hit the road again for the return trip, opting to take the southern route with a stop along the way to visit The Grand Canyon. That amazing place was so enticing to the two of us that we left our backpacks at some small hotel up on the South Rim and hiked down into the canyon, crossing the Colorado River on a little swing bridge by nightfall and spent the night at Phantom Ranch down on the floor of the canyon. We couldn’t afford to actually rent a room there (the box lunch we sprung for and split between us cost us a whopping $6, which was outrageous!) so we were just going to sleep on the bare ground until a cowboy got us spooked about scorpions and the like, so we slept on a couple of picnic tables. By the time we got back to Ridgewood three weeks after rolling out in Dad’s old Buick, we had gotten a total of 72 rides for the whole trip and covered about 7,000 miles. We arrived back with only 4 cents between the two of us. (LOL!) It was something that fulfilled a boyhood longing to go on a ‘Big Adventure’ that had been sparked many years earlier by having the tales of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer read to my brother and me as a child by my mother. And, no, the America that was back then is not what we have today, alas. About 6 weeks later I had signed up for the Air Force, so eager was I to get the hell out of the house. Now would begin some adventures of a different kind, including one year in Southeast Asia. But, that epic hitch-hiking trip of 1963 will forever be a highlight of my life. Thanks for reminding me of things we were able to do back then. :-)
Reminds me of E. B. White’s cross-country summer trip with a HS friend, in a “flivver”, on “corduroy “ roads. Another great read.
I loved this story. My adventure was hitch-hiking to Maine from Virginia for 5 weeks when I was 17. Seems so fresh in my mind but it was in 1973.
"O span of Youth! Ever-push'd elasticity" Walk Whitman. Lucian, this lifted my spirits. Lovely.
An America long gone. Thanks for reminding us what once was.
Not a story, just an anecdote. We rode in late at night on our motorbikes. Our flimsy sleeping bags were not up to the mountain cold. We woke up half frozen. A grizzled elderly couple had made a fire for us. The wife reached into the flames and -with her bare hand!- withdrew a coffee pot and poured each of us a cup. I will never forget that cup of coffee.
Man! That was an Incredible Journey. Right out of Huck Finn. Congrats for your chutzpah and spartan endurance!
Great story!
I live in Amish country and they are now much more aware of what goes on elsewhere than they were when you encountered that family back then. One of the farmers in my county is the head of a consortium of farmers who pool their milk and sell the cheese in fancy shops in New York City and the Hamptons. But they still eschew connections to the outside world via electricity. Most of the farms around here have an "Amish phone booth" in a small shed away from the rest of the buildings. They are for making calls, not for receiving calls (although most of them have a way that callers can leave a message).
I had a 3 speed raleigh when I was a kid in Ga. the only one in the neighborhood. maybe 1961 or so. I still have it today. I was so cool for having that bike lol
You make us feel like we are there. Very satisfying. Thank you.
Delightful story! Lucian, yours is an especially interesting one. You have made the story come alive. We need stories like this to remind us that life has its positive memories so that we don't get lost in the crazy-making circumstances of life. Your story reminds me of a couple of my own road trips.
While I was at Tennessee Tech, a group of three girlfriends and I took an unauthorized trip (we could not properly check out of the dorm unless we checked out "to go home.") Our plan was to go to Pensacola Beach, where one of the girls, Lulu, had a boyfriend with friends at the Navy training facility. We drove all day and all night and arrived in Pensacola by about noon. As soon as we got there, Lulu called her friend at Tennessee Tech to check in, only to be told that her mother had called because her grandfather had passed away. The friend told the mother that Lulu was on a trip to a local river beach and she would let her know as soon as she returned to the dorm (no cell phones in those days, thank goodness.) We loaded the car with our stuff and headed home without even meeting up with boyfriend and friends. Lulu managed to arrive home in time to make the funeral and her family was happy to see her there.
Another escapade took place while I was living in Atlanta, GA. One of my cousins in Wisconsin came down and she and I made a road trip to Daytona Beach, Florida. From my apartment in Atlanta, we left in my Monte Carlo. What a riotous trip. When my car developed some kind of problem, and we were stranded on the side of the road in our short shorts, we stood by the car with the hood up. A couple of helpful young guys stopped to help the maidens in distress. I have a picture of the guys working under the hood; they fixed the problem, and we were on our way. Arriving in Daytona, we met up with two of my cousin's friends and partied on with the guys.
I assume many people have memorable road trip stories from back in the day when such carefree inclinations were possible.
thank you, LKTIV.
a captivating rambling tale. full of the fresh spirit of adventure of vagabond youth.
i recall plans made with my two 10th grade buddies to go orchard picking over the summer which dead-ended when their parents shut them down.
two years later tho, i used a work pass from the railway to go cross country to Montreal Expo86. i bought an old bread factory box van, and with sleeping bag and coleman stove, wandered back home across the prairies.
my wanderlust still floats me.
Wonderful adventure story. I drove from Boston to Taos in an ancient BW pop top. I could not drive over 50 mph. The truckers kept track of the little van and knew me in truck stops, everybody sweet and polite and talkative.