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Touring the West with Leaping Lena, 1925
By W. C. Clark, David Dary UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 David A. Dary
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5451-0
CHAPTER 1
West Virginia to Kansas
WITH THE FINAL ATTACHMENTS TO BE PUT ON IN MIDDLETOWN, BUT still with a rather tourist appearance, Lena stepped onto the ferry at 10:10 and five minutes later rolled up the Ohio bank with Florence at the wheel. There was no effort at speed, the purpose being merely to run to Columbus that day, and the road was a familiar one. Wheat in Great Bend was full grown but not yet beginning to "ripen unto the harvest." The road to the junction of the Pomeroy-Portland road was dry but rough, still lacking the gravel surface we hope to see on the return trip.
The heat was intense, but the road was fine until after passing Lancaster, where began a detour which came back to the regular road at Canal Winchester; a good road it was, except that it was very dusty and the heavy traffic kept feeding us more Ohio soil than we desired.
Reached the cheerful home of the Hamptons in North Columbus at 5:30 to have it announced that the man of the house would not be home until the following day. He and the scribe had been fellow laborers in Uncle Sam's revenue service, besides which he is a most companionable fellow, so the announcement was a disappointment — one not long continued, however, as a half-hour later he drove in, having run 76 miles in two and one-half hours in order to keep the dinner appointment made last Thanksgiving. In the evening, all hands went over into East Columbus to spend an hour or two with Mother Lodge and her three sons, a fourth one of whom had followed the example of the scribe years ago and married one of the Cobb girls in Washington, one of the objects of this trip being to visit them in their Tacoma home, and a failure to have seen home folks would have been a great disappointment.
The speedometer leaving Ravenswood had read 1,755 and when it went into the garage that night it was 1,894, Lena complaining of a sore foot — in other words with one front tire softer than it should have been, and the rear tire which had gone bad in Pittsburgh threatening to blow out before morning.
* * *
Lena's fever increased during the night. In other words that soft tire had become a flat one. A little air introduced before breakfast was still there after that meal, so it was inferred that the trouble had been in the valve, and a regular dose of Ohio air proved more palatable than the West Virginia kind. The threatened blowout was too apparent to be risked further, so that tire was taken off and carried as a spare, to be discarded and a new one purchased at Middletown. It is things like this that are not included in the prospectus of a trip, that add variety and surprises to the trip, even though they do not materially increase the pleasure.
The evening before, Florence had been dropped off to visit Betty Mae Sheward and her babies, and at 9 A.M. she arrived at the Hampton home and we were soon on our way with the same blistering sun as yesterday.
Lunch at Springfield and a short distance out the remains of a freshly burned car beside the road reminded us of the perils by which we were beset. A few miles farther there was another, it not being entirely gone, still furnishing food for flames.
Next came a crossing of the traction line with a sharp turn beyond and a fine tree in front of a house; its body a foot through had been stripped of its bark where a car had struck it. Some speedster had been unable to negotiate the turn and we had a vision of the appearance of his car after it had barked the tree. But his peril was not that to which we were subject, for Mrs. Clark promptly called down the driver whenever the speedometer passed the 35-mile mark, watching that instrument being one of the things she seemed fondest of!
Near Middletown was another thing which told a story far from complete — on one side of the road was a Chevrolet car on its back while in a similar position on the other side lay one of those things which made Detroit famous. Men standing by said no one was hurt, which may or may not have been true, but there was nothing to tell whether both drivers or only one had been at fault.
The day before while stopped at a filling station at Canal Winchester, the car ahead had backed up with sufficient force to bend Lena's bumper, and while Mrs. Clark was examining the extent of the injury he suddenly backed up again and almost caught her. The danger is not all to the driver and the innocent bystander frequently gets the worst of it.
The dry spell broke finally with two nice little showers between Dayton and Middletown, and a third was breaking as we pulled up in front of the youngsters' home — the latter continuing for several hours, and giving a dry country a pretty fair wetting.
Speedometer reading 2,007.
* * *
The additions to the equipment of Lena involved some fine problems, especially that of where to carry the spare tire, and as a consequence the greasing had to go over until Monday morning; and that with taking pictures of the outfit from every angle, and other things, it was 9 when the work was done, the tank filled with gas and the grand start was made.
For the information of those contemplating a similar trip I will endeavor to describe the "tout ensemble." The car was the same new Chevrolet which was driven to Pittsburgh a few weeks before, and it was equipped with many of the devices commonly attached to cars by owners who think they can improve on the work of the manufacturer. Besides the state license tags and one announcing the name of the port from which she sailed, there were other tags proclaiming the owner to be a member of two popular automobile associations. Then in the way of equipment there was a front bumper of more than ordinary weight — which same has already proven its worth. A spotlight provided light at night available anywhere about the camp ground, as well as being a "trouble lamp" when such a thing might be needed. A horn more melodious than that designed by the manufacturer was ready to warn the fellow to "lay over." An ordinary bundle carried on one running board was offset on the other by a "grub box" four feet long and 10 inches square. The latter was divided into compartments.
But the "piece de resistance" in the way of equipment was the rear luggage carrier. It was evolved from the brain of a Pittsburgh friend, Fred Schultz, and we started with the feeling that nothing more substantial in that line would be encountered on the trip. Built of heavy iron, heavily bolted throughout, the force which would demolish it or wrench it from the car would wreck any vehicle made by man. With a length of 42 inches, a depth of 18 and a width of 24, it furnished a storage room like a tobacco barn, and was admired by all who saw it and its fortunate owner envied accordingly.
By means of these various contrivances the load was pretty evenly distributed over the car, although naturally there was considerable "cutting and trying" in getting everything loaded just as it would be most satisfactory.
The kitchen department contained a camp stove made of interwoven iron rods, with sheet iron ends, sides and top, the latter being to prevent the cooking utensils getting blackened so much. Two or three small pans furnished the ware for doing the cooking, and the table "china" was a set of plates and cups made of white granite wear, the whole enclosed in a gallon bucket of the same material. A folding steel table and three folding stools were the "furniture."
The entire equipment and personal belongings weighed probably 500 pounds in addition to the three passengers — who had a gross weight of 480 when they started.
The 20 miles to Eaton took considerable time, the road being quite indifferent in quality, but from there on it was the finest road for that length that we had ever traveled. I had heard of the wonderful gravel roads of Indiana, but did not find them. We crossed the state from Ohio to Illinois, but every foot of the way was a hard surfaced road, mostly concrete but occasionally a few miles of brick. And it was good road, too. Mrs. Clark recovered from her uneasiness of the starting days and offered no objections when Lena took the bit in his teeth and paced off mile after mile at a rate of 45 miles an hour, and occasionally an even half hundred.
At Indianapolis we stopped for a few minutes to greet Ruby Wolfe, who was just finishing her sixth year as teacher in the schools of the Hoosier capital.
The good road continued on into Illinois, and in spite of the start two hours later than had been planned, we arrived at the farthermost point we had dreamed of reaching, Effingham, Ill., in the pleasant tourist camp in which I am writing by the dying rays of the sun. For mile after mile the road was as straight as the eye could see, and apparently as level as the level of a lake, but after crossing the Wabash river at Terre Haute there were several miles of rolling country, some of which even a West Virginian had to admit was "broken country." There we had an illustration of what man can do when he tries, even without much opportunity. Going down a gentle slope along a ravine we came to where a thoughtful state had erected a guard fence to keep reckless motorists from going over the bank, but one expert driver had circumvented the state road commission and plunged his Ford coupe over that bank, landing right side up in the bottom of the ravine, apparently uninjured except for a broken rear window and a bent fender.
When the festive motorist starts out to smash something, no road is good enough to defeat his purpose.
Speedometer reported the run for the day as 265 miles.
* * *
No sooner did we strike the regular Dayton branch of the Old National Road at Eaton yesterday than there began to be a good many tourists, although not nearly so many as there will be later in the season. By the time we reached camp at Effingham we had seen cars from about half the states in the Union, and of the half dozen cars which later appeared at the camp for the night no two were from the same state, those most widely separated being one from Texas and one carrying two men who said they were from NEWburyport (pronounced all as one word and accented as indicated by the syllable in capitals), Massachusetts. They were on their way to California, had been a week on the road and were so homesick that they were thinking of going back, but decided to persevere as far as St. Louis, where one of them had an aunt. When I told him I had been in his town (I did not attempt to pronounce it as he did) he took to me like a sick kitten to a warm brick, and I think it helped his homesickness a little.
For two or three days there had been a mysterious leakage in one of our tires. Sometimes it would hold all day, and again it would lose half its air over night. Removal this morning betrayed a tiny tack in the casing, and thereby part of our troubles were removed.
Our earlier miles in Illinois last night had been through a rather poor region, but soon after starting this morning there was a decided improvement in the appearance of the country, much tilled land appearing, and the season was considerably more advanced. All the way down through Ohio, Indiana and eastern Illinois the wheat had seemed just the same as at home — fully grown but not yet turning yellow — but this morning the very first crop was considerably more advanced, and many fields will fall before the reaper next week. A still more remarkable change was in the corn when we came down onto the Mississippi river bottom just out east of St. Louis. Instead of the tiny shoots just peeping forth from the ground, the stalks were more than two feet high, almost ready to tassel out. It was easily a month farther advanced.
Vandalia, Ill., broke the continuous stretch of perfect road. It announced a speed limit of 10 miles an hour, and enforced the order by the most effective speed restriction known to the tourist. I had never been in Vandalia before, and was disappointed in its poor streets, and also in its size. Giving its name to a considerable transportation system, the Vandalia Line, it had always been thought of as a town of some consequence, forgetting a fact that sometimes very small places can do that. Remember Glendale as part of the R. S. & G.!
East St. Louis also had its streets very much torn up, and detouring there may have been responsible for us crossing the bridge farthest down the river. It saved us the price of the toll, but landed us on an unknown street. Knowing that we had to go far back from the river we kept on about 40 blocks without seeing an officer or a street name. Turning north at random we met an officer who told us how to get there, we being but a short distance out of the way, and we came straight on through to the crossing of the Missouri at St. Charles 20 miles away. There a pleasant surprise came to us in learning that 33 miles more of concrete road had been put into commission last fall, reducing our dirt road by that amount. Still pleasanter was the later discovery that six or eight more miles had just been thrown open, and so courteous was the Highway Commission of the state that two more sections each of two or three miles were opened when they saw Lena coming. (Notice we spell the name of that road-making body with capital letters, contrary to all the rules of the office.)
Because of all this we are camped in a lovely tourist camp at Fulton, Mo., the former home of Howard Sutherland and are a full half day ahead of our schedule.
Speedometer says the day's run was 236 miles.
* * *
The clover on the camp ground at Fulton was about six inches high and made a splendid foundation for a bed, tempting us to sleep a little late, but somewhere on ahead was presumably mail waiting for us, and the tourist looks eagerly forward to the points where mail is due, so there was little tarrying over the morning meal and packing. The caretaker had a visitor that morning, and we had the curiosity to ask if they had any recollection of the days when Howard Sutherland was the editor of a newspaper in their town. One of them was aware of the fact, and quite accurately estimated the time at 40 years ago. Howard was just out of college then and little dreaming what the future had in store for him, nor in what locality lay the scene of his life's activities.
We had not been particularly pleased with the appearance of the "Show Me" state as we had seen it from St. Louis to Fulton. The land had been of indifferent quality, judging by the use made of it, only a small part of it being under cultivation, and at times from high points where we could see over wide areas it appeared to be mainly occupied by timber and brush. But out of Fulton there was a decided improvement, farms becoming more common, cultivation more intense and crops better.
Our general course was parallel with the Missouri river, and with roads on both sides of the river and crossings at several rival towns, there was soon an abundance of advice as to where was the most advantageous point for the traveler to cross "Old Muddy." Notified in time of our contemplated visit, the management of Yellowstone Park had been preparing for us by melting the snow from the roads and camping places, sending the resulting water down the rivers, and as a consequence the Missouri was up. It was seldom in sight from the road, but when we did see it the current was swift and the water muddier than when J. A. Fling washes the streets at home.
Rocheport had a ferry, Booneville a free bridge, Arrow Rock a ferry, and each had plenty of advertising showing why it was the best place to cross. We chose the free bridge, and the result showed that it was as expensive as free things usually are. First thing after crossing on the free bridge — and it was a beautiful and expensive structure — when buying a morning paper in a drugstore we were presented with some more free service in the way of information regarding the roads ahead, which ended in buying a package of a new medicine that store was putting on the market, and using that means to secure distribution. It was only 40 cents, and when properly applied with a hot flannel was practically certain to cure frostbite!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Touring the West with Leaping Lena, 1925 by W. C. Clark, David Dary. Copyright © 2016 David A. Dary. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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