1958 Trip, Part 3

Happy Bastille Day. More on the 1958 trip:

From Lewiston, Idaho, we headed south through Boise and into Utah. At this remove I'm not sure if we spent the night in Salt Lake City, but I know we did spend some time there, visiting Temple Square, the Tabernacle, and a museum or something. Oddly, when I taught for a year at Utah State (in Logan) in the late 1970s, and visited Salt Lake City frequently, I don't recall ever spending much time in Temple Square again. I guess I had a been there, done that attitude. I seem to remember seeing a lot of Indian mummies in a museum there. The Pioneers' Museum? An LDS Church Museum? I'm not sure now.

Also not sure if we stayed the night in Salt Lake; I have a faint suspicion we went on to Provo for the night, though Provo is 657 miles from Lewiston according to Google maps, and the roads would have been slower in the pre-Interstate days. Perhaps we stayed somewhere else in between, in Idaho or northern Utah, and I'm blanking. Or perhaps we spent only a short time seeing Salt Lake City. Right now I'm guessing I've forgotten a stop or something, but unless I find the missing diary/daybook I don't know if I can answer the question.

From Salt Lake or Provo or wherever, we headed southeast across Utah; I believe we had lunch in Moab, which is about as middle-of-nowhere as you can get, even now. Then on down across the southwestern corner of Colorado, into New Mexico, through Shiprock and past the Shiprock itself, standing sentinel out in the desert, and into Gallup. I remember Gallup as a depressing place, unemployed Navajos hanging out on the streets, etc. I think we spent the night there.

Uncle Miles' second business meeting was in Grants, New Mexico. I think Aunt Kathy and Mama and I spent some time in Albuquerque while he was at his meetings, though a little "Distances from Albuquerque" leaflet I have in my scrapbook says its 76 miles from Grants to Albuquerque, and we had onlly one car. I'm not quite sure how that worked now. Uncle Miles' company, Landis Steel, built mining equipment and such, and Grants was in a uranium mining area, so I assume that was his reason for the meetings, but of course was oblivious to this at the time.

I believe we headed on east to Tucumcari (178 miles from Albuquerque on the old Route 66 according to "Distances from Albuquerque" in those days before Interstate 40) and stayed the night there. Tucumcari gets a lot of website space from Route 66 nostalgia buffs because it apparently still has many old restored motels and restaurants from the Route 66 heyday. My scrapbook has a postcard from the Town House Motel in Tucumcari, which must be where we stayed. That's it at the left, with the description from the back of the card below. (Tucumcari, though a fairly small town, only about 6000 today, is the biggest spot between Albuquerque and Amarillo on the old 66, and there's apparently a saying that everyone spends a night in Tucumcari at some point. I got mine out of the way 50 years ago and don't think I've been back since.)

I do note that the 1958 postcard says "Mr. and Mrs. Howard and Robert Barnard, Owners." Mr. and Mrs. Howard and Robert Barnard? Did New Mexico beat Massachusetts and California to the punch 50 years ago and no one noticed, or why does Mrs. Barnard seem to be named Robert?

From Gallup onward as far as Oklahoma City we were on the old Route 66. I grew up near Route 66 in Joplin, itself famous enough to be in the song ("It goes down through St. Louie, Joplin Missouri; Oklahoma City is mighty pretty...) Oklahoma City to Joplin, the two Oklahoma Turnpikes were already replacing 66 (they're now part of Interstate 44).

So anyway, from Tucumcari the next day we continued on across the Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma to Oklahoma City. That was my cousin Steve's home, and we stopped to drop him off. We may well have spent the night there, in fact I think we did, since we'd been driving from Tucumcari. I think that was my first visit to Oklahoma City, seeing the oil wells on the capitol grounds and other stuff, though I'm not sure about that. The next day we would have gone home up the Turner and Will Rogers turnpikes to Joplin.

One of the landmarks along the Will Rogers turnpike in those days was the then-new Glass House restaurant which spanned the turnpike and you ate looking down on the highway. Sadly it is now a McDonald's, with a debate over whether it is really the world's largest or not raging on the Internet.

That was the basic itinerary. I'll be posting more thoughts this week, though, about general impressions of the trip, travel then and now, and so on.