As I suspect is true of most of my generation from my part of the country, we have been driving vehicles since before we started walking toward tackle barns and country schools. On those tiny Georgia farms back in the 1930s, from the age of six, I drove stalk-cutters to chop up the upright but dead cornstalks after the corn was harvested and ground into meal and grits and after the dry leaves were harvested and bundled as fodder for livestock. The ground-up stalks were plowed under for the next year.
I was way before my time…driving “hybrid” vehicles back in the 1930s! (My grandfather’s mules were as “hybrid” as you could get!) If this confuses you, Google “How mules are made” or ask a Biology teacher. When older, I rode “riding plows” –mechanical contraptions with hard to work levers hated by the aforementioned mules – and by the age of ten, I was Geeing and Hawing those contrary creatures from daylight ‘til whenever. Much later, my twin uncles Wilton and Walton, and I worked for more modern farmers and drove their John Deere, Farmall and Ford tractors. On my last free day (before joining the Army) I planted field peas, using planters attached to the most reliable of all devices…a John Deere tractor.
By the early 40s, my twin uncles and I were known to drive around Claxton in very advanced automobiles! We took our drivers license exams (while the Highway Patrolman scratched his head and murmured to himself) in a car with keyless starting (we just twisted two wires together.) It was a 1935 Ford convertible without a top, with mechanical brakes that allowed us to stop if we got desperate enough, and it even had an optional smoke screen.
In my last summer in Georgia, I bought a like-new 1926 Model T Ford Touring Car. A four-door beauty that had been stored away and was nearly factory fresh, according to “Honest Abraham” the salesman, and It had been “hardly driven,” in fact kept in a barn most of the time! With ten minutes of instruction, I learned to set the spark, get to the front and grasp the dangling handle, push in, crank smartly and then to get my arm and hand out of the way! It always started the dang thing, and then I’d sit in the seat and listen to the beautiful chug a chug! Believe it or not, that car had CRUISE CONTROL, or something like it. (You just set little lever to the left of the steering wheel into a graduated notch, and the engine ran at that speed until you changed it.) The car actually had two speeds but it was not that speedy. You just pushed a low-gear pedal to start rolling then grasped and shoved forward a long handle, and after a bit of jerking, darned if the thing didn’t run in “Cruise Control.” That little jewel cost me $75 and was worth every cent. I sold it to a friend when Fort Jackson, South Carolina, called.
To help pay for that car, I drove it all over the South Georgia woods to pick up fat pine wood to split and sell as kindling. My longest “Road Trip” in the Model T was from Claxton to Riceboro, Georgia, mostly on dirt roads through Pembroke, the closed Camp (Now Fort) Stewart, Hinesville and Crossroads. Seemed like a great distance at the time but I may want to check it out if I can find my 1949 Georgia map. I would have enjoyed longer road trips back then, but all of our roads were bumpy and one had to carry cash at all times and not count on finding an open gas station after dark.
More recently, during an October road trip of about five thousand miles, as I sat warm and smug… high in the comfortable seat of my nearly-new Toyota RAV4, I spontaneously voiced to my wife of many years, a great passenger who sat to my right and who sensed that I was about to say something entirely meaningless, “A man with a good car, cruise control and air conditioning doesn’t have the right to complain about anything!” When both of her eyes shot upward immediately, I recognized the signs and quickly added…”and a good wife.”
This pronouncement took place somewhere on US 287 between Amarillo and Fort Worth (Someday soon I will write about the smooth-as-glass Texas highways), and despite the danger I found myself in. I did have a point.
I have been driving across this big country – often coast to coast – for more than fifty years, and for most of those trips, usually in Summer, what with kids and their vacations, and mostly in cars without air conditioning and those wonderful inventions called dependability, good tires, cruise control, radiators and four-lane highways.
Back then in a day’s drive, one would see a lot of cars beside the two-lane highways, with hoods raised and/or jacked up for the replacement used tire. (And, oh boy, what an adventure was the changing of the tire, on the narrow space between the ditch and death by semi-truck. Went something like this (assuming you had stopped soon enough to not completely ruin tire and inner tube (I know that 90 percent of you don’t know what an “inner tube” is):
Get the wife and kids out of danger on a picnic blanket then remove all those suitcases and other unnecessary stuff you brought along. Then remove the spare tire, which is down in a round hole, which you had hoped to ignore forever. Then find the jack assembly, lug wrench and other stuff. (The jack never looked like the jack in your previous car.) Then lock the brakes, jack up the car at the point nearest the flat. Then remove the tire, replace it with the spare while praying it was filled with air. Tighten the lug nuts, lower the jack…exhaling, and replacing everything (it never fits, and your suitcases and loose clothing are hopelessly mixed with tools!
Now you are ready to drive to the nearest “filling station” where, hopefully, someone dressed in greasy overalls will remove and repair the tube and tire, inflate it and fit it all back into your trunk.
In those Summers, along those rural roads, there would be radiators steaming and drivers fanning with hats, while wives and kids were on the grass searching for shade and relief from Dad’s cursing. One seldom sees that beautiful Saturday Evening Post scene today.
I first made the entire cross-country trip in 1964, on my way from the East to the Presidio of Monterey and the Army Language School (Now the Defense Language Institute – a bit uppity, I’d say). A First Lieutenant about to be promoted, I had been recalled to Active Duty, sent to a refresher course in Maryland and was on my way to Monterey, California, with my wife and our three children – eight and under. I was driving a used 1962 Buick Special with an add-on air conditioner, which worked unless it was hot outside. My habit then was to drive all day and all night and stop at noon the next day at a motel with a pool. Money was tight and this seemed to work well enough with our family. The kids really loved those pools!
On that trip, of course, there were no Interstates; we drove mostly on Route 66 from town to town, and always right down mainstreet. And the main streets of Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Tucumcari, Albuquerque, Gallup, and the like, were LONG ones.
We stopped often and enjoyed the Winslow Crater, the Petrified Forest and those junky stops at the Indian fake tee pees alongside the road. The kids remember that traffic was halted on the highway while jets were practicing some maneuvers from Edwards Air Force Base. (We couldn’t help but notice that the highway had been practically paved with dead and flattened Jackrabbits between Barstow and Mohave. I haven’t seen a live Jackrabbit in that area since that time.)
Because we returned to Fort Ord in 1973 for my terminal assignment and retirement and have lived in California since, we have made the same road trip many times, to Georgia to visit my family and to Oklahoma to visit Lee’s. And after the “kids” dispersed, we have made those trips and others to visit them, as far as Des Moines and often to Texas and Colorado. And let me say that driving to those same destinations today in a comfortable car is an absolute pleasure!
And I stand by my assertion that a man with a good car, with cruise control and air conditioning (and a good wife) has no right to complain about anything!
