Growing Up American: Summer Vacation 1939 (Audio Available)

Good morning,

Your piece, “Growing Up American: Summer Vacation 1939,” at American Thinker this morning took me back to a much-missed time and led me to your blog. Your blog is exceptional in content and presentation. I will be a regular visitor.

Best regards,
Ernie

Hello Susan,

I’m a former Syracusan but now live in small Finger Lakes village.

I read your piece on Summer Vacation 1939 and enjoyed it for the memories it brought back to me of 1950’s vacations. One, in 1956 to Niagara Falls, in particular.

Where I live still resembles the ‘old days’ in many ways. But, the outlanders come for vacations and, like ocean waves against the rocky shore, slowly wear the ‘old days’ ways away.

I have a friend from Syracuse in Calif. He sends me lots of email about Agenda 21. I always thought our Constitution would protect us from that. Now, I’m not so sure.

Thanks for a nice piece about days gone by!

-Phil

Thank you for your column “Growing Up American” on AT today. Now that was a column I could really relate to and enjoy!

Cars today are so boring and small, don’t you think? No style, no power, no fun, no room. Full off gadgets which have nothing to do with driving a car. I still drive a stick shift–just can’t give it up.

I remember Dinah Shore singing the Chevy jingle very well. In those days a Caddy was not just someone who works on a golf course.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s our yearly summer vacations consisted of all of us piling into our family’s 1952 Hudson Hornet and setting out from our small New Jersey town to whatever sites were within reasonable driving distance. Invariably before leaving, my father, a very methodical engineer, would take me along with him to the local AAA office where he consulted with an agent and then received the AAA trip-tik, a small spiral bound booklet that contained our route marked out in orange on various regional maps, and AAA-suggested places to stay and eat and sites to see. Those little booklets with their folding maps were the Bibles of our various vacations. I can still remember how proud and excited I was when I was finally old enough to be in charge of the booklet as the designated family navigator, and how eagerly I followed our progress on the maps in the booklet as we made our way toward our next destination.

So where did we go? Independence Hall, Valley Forge, Hershey, the Amish country, the PA Grand Canyon, Gettysburg, Fort Ticonderoga, Lake George (where my father taught me to row a boat at the Flamingo Motel, still in business fifty years later), the Adirondacks, Howe Caverns, Ausable Chasm, the Finger Lakes, Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, Lexington, Concord, Boston, West Point, DC, Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay, Annapolis. These are the highlights that I can still vividly remember. Nothing fancy, but still very memorable.

We stayed in AAA-recommended family motels along the road, and ate in family style restaurants and road-side diners, such as can still be found in parts of PA today (one of the charms of living in PA is all the anachronisms than have survived in PA). The more rural parts of Route 22 in PA are very reminiscent of the types of roads that we used to drive on, except in those days things were less congested and built up. And of course in the mountain and lake areas most of the roads were quite rural.

In additional to being memorable these vacations were also highly educational. We learned a great deal of American history, met and got to know our fellow Americans, and got an appreciation for the size and beauty of our country. All practically “in our own backyard,” so to speak. Pride in America was a big part of it.

I agree, you can keep the cruises, long airplane trips and fancy resorts et al. Just give me good old road-side Americana.

Have you seen the TV show Route 66? It’s my all-time favorite TV show. I originally saw it as a child but have also seen it in syndication over the years; it is currently being broadcast on the RetroTV network (http://www.myretrotv.com/) at 9PM (just like the old days on CBS!). As a mature adult I can now fully appreciate this truly exceptional TV series which I so enjoyed watching as a child, certainly among the best to ever have appeared on the American market. The stories, writing, camerawork, directing, locations, casting all are excellent and highly engaging. I have found many of the episodes to be quite moving, particularly since they deal with people who tend to live lives off the beaten path or “to a different drummer’s beat,” and many controversial or rarely mentioned topics (at least for the 1960’s) are incorporated into the stories. The dialogue is so tight that you literally cannot miss a single line. The episodes were completely shot on location all across America, some of these locations are quite picturesque, and the overall effect of all this location shooting is that the series provides a striking visual and social portrait of America c.1960, especially blue collar America, an America living its life in a manner very different from today, and an America that was far less homogenized than it is today.

I don’t mind telling you that I would have been more than happy to have had either Tod or Buz, the two guys traveling around in the Corvette, for an older brother. One of the two main characters of the series, Tod Stiles (played by Martin Milner), had attended college before deciding to hit the road in a Corvette with a street-wise buddy named Buz (who sported a fine New York accent as delivered by George Maharis) in order to get to know the various parts of our vast and diverse country, along with an appropriate dose of adventure and romance. It is not clear whether Tod graduated from college, but he is always described as a college man educated at Yale. The show makes clear that a man who attended college in those days was the exception, not the rule, and furthermore the writers of the show repeatedly portray Tod as having gotten a very fine broad education at Yale, which enabled him to discuss history, poetry and other subjects which are like a foreign language to most college graduates today. In the early 1960’s a college man could be very credibly portrayed as having an extraordinarily broad-based higher education, a classical liberal education; by contrast in 2013 a college man (or woman) is thought of as someone with a diploma that entitles him to work in a bank, or as a salesman or cook, or discuss gender or queer studies, but certainly not as someone well versed in Homer, Dante or Milton, or in Beethoven, the history of Rome or the gods of Ancient Egypt. On the other hand, Buz, who was raised in an orphanage and on the streets of New York City, does not have Tod’s education, but makes up for it with his street-smarts and his strong personality and principles. It’s a nice contrast which sometimes leads to tense disagreements between the two characters, which only adds to the flavor of the show.

Route 66 is from the same production company as The Naked City, which is also of a similar quality, but is a gritty police drama set on the streets of New York. Naked City is famous for always ending with the lines, as a voice-over: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”

So if you can catch Route 66, give it a try! You’ll enjoy the ride in the Corvette!

And thanks for your column. A nice change from the usual American Thinker fare,

Bill Meisler

I too had never heard of you before the American Thinker 1939 article. I had no such family vacation memories; like my father before me I never was more than 70-100 miles from my home until “Uncle Sam” intervened.