Fifty Years Ago, in an America Far, Far Away...

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.

The Big Six O: Let's Drop Churchill's Name

Okay, I'm 60 today. Tonight's going to be a quiet one at home; it's a school night. We went out for a nice Thai meal last night.

My thought for the day: Winston Churchill turned 60 in 1934. He was a has-been, a political outcast. So 60's hardly the end. Not that I expect to be called upon to save civilization, exactly. But there's still a lot to be done.

On the other hand, besides that saving Western Civilization thing, Churchill was a great writer and speaker and able to consume incredible quantities of brandy while smoking cigars constantly and, predictably, it killed him by the time he was in his mid-90s. You sort of have to admire that. Not emulate it: most of us wouldn't last so long.

It is said that when Roosevelt and Churchill were preparing to meet Ibn Saud on the Suez Canal in Egypt, Ibn Saud sent word that his religion forbade there to be any smoking or drinking in his presence, and Churchill allegedly replied along the lines that his religion required him to drink brandy and smoke cigars throughout the day and at every meal. For all my own personal respect for Muslim mores when in a Muslim environment, I really like that story nonetheless.

Churchill was, of course, politically incorrect in many ways (Gandhi was "a half-naked fakir" and "I did not become His Majesty's Chief Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire") but when it came to the back-to-the-wall moment, he had what was needed. And then, after he'd saved Britain and the war was won, he was repudiated at the polls, and democrat that he was ("the worst form of government except for all the others"), he went home. Not that he then happily supported Attlee ("a modest man with much to be modest about") or anything.

Anyone who cut their history-of-World War II-teeth on Churchill's memoirs, by the way, needs to read David Reynolds' In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, possibly the best book I've ever seen about how a major work of (history? memoir? self-creation?) was written. The Amazon link is for the hardover but the paper is apparently due out in November. A good read, and an illuminating one.

Churchill never wrote history quite like anybody else did. It was either memoir (even his multi-volume The World Crisis about World War I was a memoir encased in a narrative of the rest of the war) or a personal story (his Marlborough was, like his biography of his father, about an ancestor and hardly objective. It's still the best book on the subject. Even the juvenile stuff is well written. (I first read The River War, about the Sudan campaign and Omdurman, in high school, but even then was impressed with the prose.) And of course, he deliberately did not call The Second World War "A History of the Second World War" because it was his own view, the second world war as seen by Winnie. (And, by the way, he made "The Second World War" canonical even though we Yanks may still say "World War II"more often.) UPDATE: Someone might object, I suppose, that his History of the English-Speaking Peoples is not a personal history. But if you'll note that Australians, Canadians, and (especially) Indians and Nigerians and other darker English-speaking peoples don't get much space, I think it is pretty clear that in Winston's view, the whole history of the English-speaking peoples was aimed at producing Great Britain and the United States, and perhaps someday culminating in a British Prime Minister with an American mother ... (This last comment was added Sept. 28.)

Okay, enough. Churchill was a 19th century man in so many ways, particularly in his imperial views and his comfortable use of "the English race" and even (what...?) "the American race"; his History of the English Speaking Peoples slights India, the most populous English-speaking nation then and now. But I'm still glad we (all of us English speaking peoples, and the rest as well) had him when we needed him.

A Gorgeous Jamestown Book

I gushed earlier about Jamestown and mentioned that everybody's writing books on the subject. I want to praise one I've only partially read. It's John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609, by Helen C. Rountree, Wayne E. Clark, and Kent Mountford. Published by the University of Virignia Press (Charlottesville and London: wonder what Mr. Jefferson would think of that?), 2007.

It's a truly interdisciplinary work. Rountree is the ethnohistorian who has done most of the groundbreaking work on the Powhatan and other Chesapeake Indians. Clark is apparently a local history type and Mountford an ecologist. They have tried to recreate and explain Smith's voyages (and the early explorations generally) in terms of the local cultures, geography, flora and fauna, and ecology of the Bay at the time.

I think the book was about $30 or so. The maps alone are worth it. I'm a local history/local Indians buff and find the book enormously informative, but I think geographers, ecologists, Save the Bay people, and local history folks will enjoy it as well.

I haven't read it all yet, but the maps alone are gorgeous and the book has tremendous production values.

UPDATE: A belated realization that you might want to find the Amazon link for this book. No, I'm not getting a commission.