See also in newspapers/indep
Dear Lucy Gillmore
A revised version as promised.Brian Corbett
THAT SUMMER 1957 ACROSS AMERICA by ROUTE 66
An unconventional journey across the Southern States by three young engineers, who emigrated to Canada in the summer of 1956. So vivid still that the first draft was written entirely from memory, but the detail was checked mainly from the letters I wrote at the time to my future wife. Captures the period through, the racial attitudes, popular music and jazz, literature, social issues like divorce and finding the time for living, and the country itself.
Personal Notes
Pioneer in the development of computer systems for industrial process control. Electronic engineering graduate of Imperial College and Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, I was author of several international conference papers. Now I am an OAP who writes, mainly on political issues and travel. My current interests include independent travel in Europe, Asia and South America (with my wife and a rucksack); languages (both European and Asian); politics (as an observer); tech stocks; ball sports; ‘modern’ jazz and photography.Northern Peru
We have just returned from two months independent travel, upmarket geriatric backpacking, in Peru, especially the little visited north of that country. Trujillo with Chan Chan and Huaca de la Luna, Chicklayo with Sipan and Tucume, Chachapoyas with Kuelap and Revash, Leymebamba with the mummies of Laguna del Condores, Cajamarca and the Quechua language demonstration, Huaraz with Chavin and the glacier of Pasto Ruri, Caraz with Corpus Christi and Laguna Paron. I intend to write about those experiences and back the copy with quality slides on Fuji Provia 100F film. Interested?Brian Corbett
62 Radyr Avenue, Swansea, SA3 5DTtelephone 01792 424702
email: becorbett@ntlworld.com
ACROSS AMERICA BY ROUTE 66
‘We’ll give you a car to drive, but you pay the gas’. This wasn’t the regular business of Detroit Drive Away, which was to deliver cars on a commercial basis, but it offered us a way to cross The Excited States, as we called them, for our first annual holiday in North America. Dave from Oxford, Joe from Dublin and I were three of group of twenty new graduate engineers enticed to emigrate the previous year for three times the £550/year starting rate in Britain. Our dream faded fast as we moped around Detroit waiting for a car that August 1957.
Then came the breakthrough, we were first to go to Memphis where we would get a second car to San Francisco. I, just 22, with only six months experience, drove gingerly to the first minor crossroads and nervously slammed on the brakes. We all but went through the windscreen of that brand new car, for power braking was newfangled invention I had not met before. I like to think we delivered Elvis Presley’s pink Cadillac, but in fact we were only taking the car to Indianapolis, and would have to make our own way to Memphis. The others chose to go by train, but I preferred to hitch-hike. I walked out of the city, in khaki shorts with an ex-army rucksack, an innocent abroad, looking every inch the Boy Scout I never was.
One ride I spent in fear of my life with a crazy man, who was overtook everything in sight, even when it meant crossing the brow of a hill on the wrong side of the road. Luckily he was stopped by the police, and ended up in a rapidly convened meeting with a judge resulting in a $13 on the spot fine. A laid back Kentucky painter who, having lost his city job was on his way back to his wife and eight kids, told me in a slow southern drawl, ‘I have a couple of acres so we won’t starve… some people work in the winter snow but I just sits by the fire’. The ruddy farmer whose father came from England in 1885 was on his way to the races at Ellis Park.
The black man had just returned from service with the paratroopers in Korea and Japan, he was the only person I encountered with liberal views. ‘I hate fighting civilians, there’s no point in turning people into killers’. But the overwhelming memories are questions of race. He told me, ‘it’s very unusual for a white to get a lift from a black man’, but he took me into the unfamiliar white area of Nashville to find a hotel. Next day a garage hand in a pick up truck explained, ‘there’s no rivalry between the Yankees and the South any more, we just hate the niggers’. Another expressed the hatred more vividly, ‘Nigger don’t let the sun go down’, that is get out of our nice white town before sunset. He boasted of lynching and hangings from trees outside town, which brought real context to Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit … hanging’.
From Memphis we were to return a stolen 56 Plymouth to its rightful owner. Little did we know when we stopped for the first night at Little Rock that within a month this sleepy town was to be at the centre of world news. The US Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that segregation of schools was no longer legal and the Little Rock Central High School decided to de-segregate at the start of term on 2 September1957. The nine final year black students who presented themselves that first day were barred entry by the Arkansas National Guard acting on instructions from Governor Faubus. President Eisenhower had to send in 1000 paratroopers before the school was re-opened. The following September trouble erupted again, because Governor Faubus, ordered all three high schools to be closed, and supported by a 94% popular vote they remained so for that whole school year. It was fifteen years before all the schools in Little Rock were desegregated.
To keep our spirits up as we drove through miles of flat, treeless, monotonous prairie we sang our way through the musical Oklahoma, just released on film. ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’, and a risqué version of ‘Everything’s up to date in Kansas City … we’ve even got a sky scraper seven stories high’. Somehow the towns never lived up to the exotic images created by the songs. Towns rarely interrupted the journey, but were always preceded by miles of ugly roadside advertising hoardings.
Dave and I had a burning ambition to ‘do the ton’, which few mass produced cars of the day would reach. In spite of the 60mph speed limit these empty prairie roads seemed to offer the best chance I was ever likely to get. By the time I had wound the Plymouth up to 90 and started to overtake I saw a car approaching fast, but hung on sure of being let in. I wasn’t and the cars were abreast simultaneously, luckily all three drivers held their nerve. My target achieved, I glanced in the rear mirror only to see a car gaining on me. Knowing that could only be a police car I slowed down without braking, and braced myself for the confrontation ahead. But, ‘phew’, he merely sped by.
Cowboy country and steaks sizzling on hot metal plates started soon after we joined Route 66, which gets to Oklahoma from Chicago. We three went into a bar in the early evening to find the only other customer was a beautiful cowgirl dressed in vivid silks of a sort we never expected to see in real life. Things were about to hot up, we were entering the Wild West.
Santa Fe was a revelation, Mexican and Indian cultures were a heady mix, hot spicy food, and music to match provided a night-life to die for. Now it is one of America’s top tourist attractions, but in those days there were none to be seen. ‘We take the time to enjoy ourselves here’ said the large Mexican waitress, hitching her belt in a few inches. We danced the night away to exciting Latin rhythms, in the same month that jazzman Charles Mingus recorded his most approachable album, Tijuana Moods. It was early morning before we rolled into our giant sized family bed, only to be later joined by two boisterous buxom Mexican women, obviously tipped off by the night watchman. Was I really the prude who stopped everyone’s fun?
Grand Canyon, with its the beautiful range of blues, greys and pinks, plus sheer size, was the first world site to exceed my expectations. Only the Taj Mahal, the Golden Temple and Machu Picchu have followed. On to Flagstaff and the brilliant white Indian trading post with Indian artefacts advertised by totem poles.
In this gambling country the barmen would offer you the chance of rolling dice; win and the drinks were free, lose and you paid double. Las Vegas seemed like Blackpool, full of cheap hotels and glitzy shows, where the Admass spent hours pumping small coins into fruit machines in the hope of making a fortune. (Admass, J B Priestley’s word, was coined in ‘Journey Down a Rainbow’ to describe the soulless advertising driven society of mass production, conformity and consumerism which was spreading over the West, and to contrast his experiences in brash Texas with his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, writing sympathetically about the artist colony in Santa Fe and the ancient Indian cultures of New Mexico.
Finally across the first desert I had ever seen, the deserted, barren, roadside littered with beer cans, which never rusted, for the only moisture was inside occasional man sized cactus trees. We were one of a few cars crossing the Mojave that day, all the others had prepared for emergency by strapping a five gallon water can to the outside of the door.
What can be said of cosmopolitan San Francisco? Friendly - witness Ralph and Hal, newly qualified as lawyers, who took a day off work and spent several nights showing us around. Unique – the cable car; Fisherman’s Wharf with fishermen; the twentieth birthday of the Golden Gate bridge; the Japanese garden; the automatic piano museum overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Exciting – clubs on the Barbary Coast at North Beach where the verb to Shanghai (a reluctant sailor) emerged. Young Anna Massey was playing The Reluctant Debutant. Gay, in the original sense of the word, the only pubs with atmosphere outside Greenwich Village, a wood panelled basement with a large nude painting whose modesty was protected by a strategically draped red silk scarf, which swayed each time the door was opened! Vivacious girls, wonderful food, jokes with an Australian artist, who claimed to have made the Tate, at nearby Tiburon - a yachting paradise.
Leading edge - San Francisco was then the Gretna Green of still difficult divorce, with columns in the papers for Divorces Filed and Divorces Granted. It was the golden age of west coast jazz with Clifford Brown and Gerry Mulligan. We heard New Orleans star Turk Murphy in the Tin Angel, but regrettably the new trumpet star Miles Davis had just left to play in New York.
Joe and I eventually returned to ‘the old countries’, but Dave soon left for San Francisco and was never heard of again. Like me, an electronic engineer, maybe he struck it rich in the soon to emerge Silicon Valley.
1582 words by Brian Corbett - The Oldie Backpacker 27/10/03
I have some ancient supporting slides if you are interested
1) A clip of me at the wheel of the Cadillac
2) Joe and Dave at the roadside with the Plymouth
3) The Original Curio Store, Established 1603, in Santa Fe
4) The Indian Trading Post near Flagstaff
