A week from now*, on July 5, will be the 50th anniversary of the beginning of my great road trip to the West, a formative experience I've blogged about before. I plan to retrace what I can in memory and from scrapbooks on this blog. Since I'm involved in a major project at work (and at least this weekend also have to finish a book chapter I've contracted for) it may not be daily. But I do want to get my memories down, for Sarah if for no one else.* Actually a week from "tomorrow" since the post is tagged as 11:59 pm. I thought it would be tagged after midnight and wrote accordingly.
To recap: in July 1958 my Dad was shifting from managing the Montgomery Ward Farm Store in Joplin to become head of the automotive department at the new Sears Store opening at Eastmoreland Plaza (now, as the link suggests, more a historical artifact than a place: this link says it opened in 1956; a recent photo history of Joplin says 1957. It was certainly still new when my Dad started in 1958.). He had to go away for 10 days or two weeks or some such to someplace out of town, either Kansas City or Oklahoma City, though I can't now remember which. My Uncle, Miles Landis (married to my mother's sister, Aunt Kathy Landis), ran a steel company in Picher, Oklahoma (recently wiped out by a tornado in 2008) and lived in Baxter Springs, Kansas, about 20 miles west of Joplin. He had meetings in British Columbia and New Mexico (and maybe elsewhere) and suggested that he and Aunt Kathy take my Mom, me, and my first cousin Steve Jones (who lived in Oklahoma City) on a road trip out west while my Dad was away. (Photo above is us at 10 am -- according to my scrapbook -- on July 5, 1958, a Saturday, which as it happens it will also be in this 50th anniversary year, the 4th being a Friday both years, standing behind the 1958 Oldsmobile that carried us for the next two weeks. I'm the kid in the white T-shirt; Steve's the one in the hat. Aunt Kathy's on the left, my Mom on the right, and Uncle Miles in the middle.Don't recall who took the photo: maybe my Dad. And why does my mother seem to be holding her purse up for the camera? I have no clue.) (Uncle Miles always had an Oldsmobile; Aunt Kathy always had a Cadillac. They were the wealthy side of the family, but Miles, the good businessman, knew that the Olds had the same engine as the Caddy and cost less; Kathy was more interested in the prestige. And I can't resist saying that this was your father's, or in this case my uncle's, Oldsmobile.) I'd never been West of eastern Kansas and Oklahoma. I'd never seen the Rockies. I'd never been in a foreign country, and British Columbia was, of course (gasp) Canada. I'd never seen a desert. I got to see all those things. (Though, oddly enough, I didn't get to see an ocean till college. And having become a Middle East specialist along the way, I've seen a lot more deserts.)
I noted in an earlier post linked above that this was the last moment of the pre-stamped-out-by-cookie-cutter road trip. McDonald's and other chain fast food joints hadn't yet appeared most places. (Dairy Queen and, I guess, Howard Johnson were the main chain food joints, but I don't even think HoJo was spread much in the West in those days.) The Interstate Highway system was being built, but was in its infancy: there'd be a few miles, usually around cities, complete, at most. A good part of the trip -- Gallup, New Mexico to Oklahoma City, at least -- was on the old Route 66 of happy memory. It was the last chance to see pre-Interstate, pre-franchise America, and I treasure what I remember of it.
In one of those odd bits of coincidence or synchronicity, two weeks ago the Washington Post's Sunday Book World supplement ran this highly favorable review of a new book entitled Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations, by Susan Sessions Rugh of Brigham Young University. The timing couldn't have been better since this was about postwar American vacations and I was thinking very much about the golden anniversary of one that had a major impact on me. So I found it on Amazon and ordered it, and while I've only been reading for a little over a day, I think I can recommend it for anyone who did road trips in the 50s and 60s. It's a tad academic but not tediously so, and it spends a lot of time on issues of segregation and the problems blacks had finding accommodations, which were major issues most of us were blissfully ignorant of in the 50s but which deserve to be understood, but my main complaint is it seems too short.
You'll be seeing more on the 1958 trip as we go through the 50-year anniversary of it. I used to have -- I think even after I moved into this house, which means it's presumably still here somewhere -- a desk-calendar/daybook I used as a diary (something Uncle Miles gave me I think), but can't find it now. Some of the dates are in the scrapbook I kept, and others I have to guess at. I'll blog periodically through the anniversary, and all the posts will be accessible through the category 1958 Trip.
Stay tuned.
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