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We take our modern, reliable and comfortable cars (and lives) for granted. How would your teenage daughter take to spending a road trip like this? If you’re old enough, you’ll relate to that look of profound boredom: no iPhone, DVD player, not even music of any sort. Not even a window! How did they/we do it (he asks rhetorically, remembering all too well)?
carrosantigos has collected a series of typically superb old LIFE magazine photos shot on Hwy 30 in 1948. It’s a stark reminder of how far we’ve come; well, except those that have been left behind.
via hemmings.com
43 Comments on “On The Road, In 1948...”
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Stunning photography! Just a little before my time, but late 40s cars were still numerous in my earliest memories. The roads weren’t all that different either.
It’s obvious a lot of people just camped on the side of the road. Today, you can still find roads that empty, but you have to go off the beaten track.
I was never bored on road trips, despite no radio in our family cars and of course no a/c. I was always interested in where the road was leading us.
Many of those roads are still there. Even emptier than ever. Route 30 through Nebraska still looks very much the same. After a few interminable I-80 trips with poor pavement and 90mph trucks, I have started to enjoy the old US routes. Given the speed limit is 65mph, you really don’t lose much time.
Coloring books, license plate games, Zip-on-the-Windmill(graveyard, white horse, etc), Riddle-dee-dee, torturing the little bro sitting on the hump……
We used to get a kick out of asking my Grandpa how much longer. His reply was always, “Ten more minutes!”
I’m not sure I can remember the last time I was bored…
(Postscript: http://carrosantigos.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/blog_carros_antigos_wordpress_16.jpeg <– I'll bet that one hurt in the morning…)
How did they/we do it?
As kids, we looked out the window and enjoyed the grandeur of the countryside, counted telephone poles, played ‘eye spy’, dreamed big thoughts, read books, and talked with each other, rather than being fed our entertainment via a DVD player.
This is how my family toured the country this summer for two weeks, tent camping all but two nights (OK, one son had an iPod). And the kids know that we’ll get a car entertainment center over my dead body. For these kinds of journeys, getting there is as much fun as being there.
Yes, and you also used to be able to slap your kids until they kept quiet.
Not all kids are glued to an entertainment device, even today. Many (most) aren’t, in fact, but if you have very small children (eg, less than two years and barely verbal) I wholly understand the temptation for giving them something to do, especially since the nature of driving with kids has changed.
Example: Our family makes a fairly frequent trip to Ottawa along Highway 7 to visit relatives. It’s several hours, often made longer by the need to stop and feed or pee someone. It tests an adult’s patience and drives kids nuts. Back in the “good old days” you could drive with your children unbuckled (so they could get the wiggles out) and you could drive while breastfeeding an infant. You can’t do either of these things now, and a drive with a screaming infant who wants to be nursed, plus a toddler who is being driven nuts by said infant’s screaming and screaming more in turn, is no fun. And since I can’t just slip them both a sedative, you do what you have to do, since you cannot just stop for hours (especially in winter) to let everyone unwind, nor can you slap them into submission.
For us, this means we take the bus or the train where possible. For others, it means an electronic pacifier. I will no longer judge another parent’s use of such a device because I’ve been there.
It’s still dangerous to be unbuckled on a bus or train, but statistically less so than in a car ;)
You make good points. We’re about to embark on a regular holiday roadtrip (10-12 hours each way), but this year with an infant that means stopping overnight instead of driving straight through.
But when the little man gets older, I hope we can keep him occupied with maps, GPS*, verbal games, and just looking out the window. That’s all I needed as a kid, at least for the first couple hours of a trip…
(*Yes, GPS is electronic, but it supplements a knowledge of geography and mapping, so I’m fine with that)
psarhjinian it’s perfectly ok to give them Benedryl – the maximum dose ;)
@psar:
We no longer have to pause for nursing/diaper stops for our five kids (now aged 10-21), but the longest trip we ever took with them in that phase was about 12 hours. I remember bottles being a great help for the youngest ones, and actual stops were maybe 1/2 hour every few hours. As a driver, I’m able to tune out most screaming, although we had plenty of impromtu stops for discipline when there were problems. Seat belts have always been mandatory.
To each parent as they see fit, I suppose.
You would appreciate my idea for “in car entertainment” when we were looking at crew cab trucks. I was going to install an nice wood book shelf behind the front seats. I always passed long trips with a good book or watching the scenery, like the warship’s bridge rising out a New Jersey pasture on I-95.
You know, there was a trying day this spring when I was travelling to see my father (from north Kawartha to Niagara On The Lake) and around Oakville, while mired in traffic at Ford Dr., I discovered that, yes, I did have some Children’s Chewable Benadryl in the car.
I didn’t cross that line, though I very nearly did, and might have, had the stuff not been expired and sitting in a car for months.
I’m reading Prof. Charles Hyde’s history of Nash, Hudson and AMC. It turns out that the Rambler’s famous (or infamous if you were the father of a teenage girl) lay down front seats had their origins in the camping craze of the 1920s (you can see the ‘RV’ that Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Tom Edison used to go camping at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn). Originally, the back seats of Nash cars folded down and you slept with your feet in the trunk. Later Nash switched to the laydown front seats. The book’s not here right now, I’ll try to find some of the ad copy Nash used to promote it – specifically for campers and other auto travelers. Hyde points out that this became less of a selling point as motels and other inexpensive lodging proliferated along America’s highways.
Even in the early 70s we kids would lay in the package shelf under the rear window of the car while our parents would hurtle down the interstate at 75 or 80. I once rode in a big 68 Mercury fastback that had a package shelf wide enough for two of us to lay down side by side.
Some of the great fun of station wagons in those days was the big rear play floor when all the seats were folded down.
It is a wonder that any of us over 50 ever got past the age of about 12.
Yup, the good old days! I remember travelling from Ottawa to Windsor Ontario in my Uncle John’s 63 Impala 2-door coupe, with my mother, my aunt, my Uncle John (who drove the entire trip), my brother and I, our two cousins, and my grandmother. Efght people crammed into the car, and we drove it straight through. Back in the late 50’s – early 60’s, most of the highways were either two-lane, or in the case of secondary and tertiery “highways”, gravel in much of rural Ontario. What today takes 6 hours, would take 12 hours 50 years ago.
When we were young parents, we would drive from Winnipeg to Calgary or Vancouver, and once the kids were old enough to read boredom was no longer a factor. Books were the magical tool, especially with our son, that would keep everybody quiet.
Seeing the posted pictures really reminds me of all of the, now cool, cars I would struggle to identify on those long road trips. Especially exciting were any sightings of extinct makes – I recall that on one trip, my father spotted a Kaiser Dragon, and we had to stop and talk to the owner! It’s all those trips that sparked my love affair with extinct brands.
Growing up (80s and 90s) we would often travel about thee or four hours south of Houston to see my grandfather in Sinton, Texas. Whenever we would load up to go home, he would always bring out sack lunches for everybody. I always thought this was a bit unusual as we never had any food shortage on the way down. Later, I came to realize that in his formative years, travel was much more of an adventure that it was in my childhood, and there wouldn’t always be a place to eat or you might get stuck out somewhere and having an extra turkey sandwich would sure be handy. Thanks for passing this link along.
Topping off the radiator and changing rear flats on cars with rear fender skirts – those were the good old days,
I have a vague recollection of swamp coolers, mainly because we never had one. Everyone had a window and vent windows up front.
Until I read your reply, I thought that gizmo was an early radar gun!
Forget the 50s and 60s, this is some Detroit iron I can get excited about. Anybody know what kind of car is in the photo of the guy eating in the trunk? Such nice lines.
Definitely a postwar Chrysler product, most likely a 1946-48 Dodge sedan.
Here’s Paul’s CC Outtake on this model:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/01/curbside-classic-outtake-look-what-just-pulled-into-the-parking-lot-edition-1948-dodge/
My uncle bought a used one in the Fifties. It was dark blue as I recall, and the interior was so huge you could (almost) play volleyball in there!
Thanks 210, I think you nailed it. I remember that CC, one of my favorites. A great looking classic sporting a bike rack, what’s not to love?
Kids had fun they remembered.
Food tasted better.
Travel still carried a magical sense that the undiscovered awaited.
Relationships and sex meant something.
Yeah, we’ve come a long way since then…
Great series of photos but that one of the girl in the wooden loft seems like a composite. Her size relative to the tail gate, the way she is well illuminated but there’s a lot of shadow in the foreground. Maybe it’s just due do an awkward angle and the use of flash on the subject.
Pickups were lots smaller then. This looks like something from the thirties; not much bigger than a Model A. Tiny compared to current trucks.
I wonder what people will think in 2072 when they look back at our day.
“Back then we didn’t need all this new junk. we were perfectly happy with a fuzzy six inch screen and maybe GPS to see the river and town names! And that was all just lines and colors, too. No individual surround audio, no wrapscreens for movies, no g-load autorestraints – hell, a couple of pieces of nylon strap was good enough! And kids don’t have any sense of responsibility now. They think just because STD have been eliminated they can go sleep with whoever they want!” – etc etc etc…
Most interesting is that this is a Brazilian site. carrosantigos translates to Antique Cars.
Nice find!
I’m glad I still get to experience similar things when I go on vacation, I feel a lot of things in life make sense and feel good when I’m removed from my computer.
BRB off to see America.
For those of us on limited budgets, stocking the trunk of your car with ‘essentials’ like oil, coolant, a spare fanbelt and a small selection of tools is still part of everyday driving! No air-con, almost non existent suspension, iffy brakes and a gaping hole in the dash where the radio should be. Now that’s travelling in style!
Having owned numerous cars with potential to break down, I’ve always carried quite a collection of tools with me on trips over about 4 hours, including a full set of miscellaneous hand tools, standard and metric socket sets, tire plug kit, a gallon of water, and a quart of oil.
Inevitably, if I don’t need them on the trip, someone I encounter will.
This habit started with an incident on the PA Turnpike in which I had to splice an exhaust pipe with an old steel soda can and coat hangar I found near the side of the road, with no tools to use.
I once replaced part of a snapped throttle cable on a Fiat 124 station wagon with the low E string from my guitar. Drove it that way for months, too.
It’s funny on how much things have changed. Going north on Hwy 69 you can still see the dead motels and abandoned gas station/restaurants that were oh so necessary back then. Going to Sudbury from Toronto must have meant a stopover where today it can be done as a — long — roundtrip without much of a drama from our cars.
“I’m not sure I can remember the last time I was bored…”
What popped into my increasingly enfeebled brainlet reading the above was a synopsis of a university-based study that determined that, generally, those with higher intelligent levels (the study DID mention the variability, nuances and subjectivity of “intelligence” and how levels of “intelligence”) tended/trended to not have to confront boredom as much or to as great a degree as those who tend to rank/rate lower on various methods of measuring “intelligence” with various reasons believed to explain why those of “higher intelligence” tend/trend towards not having to contend with boredom to as great a degree as their less mentally endowed fellow humanoids.
It was an interesting read and made sense to me.
Of course, as a lad, a member of a generally impoverished working-poor lower socio-economic class family, if I had not been born a male I would have had nuthin’ to play with, ‘ceptin for a few rocks and sticks out in the yard.
Oh, Hwy 30.
The yearly summer trek to visit kinfolk back in Blair, Nebraska, where granny, who lived in town had to use an outhouse until her multiple kids chipped in to outfit her shanty with that new-fangled indoor outhouse stuff in 1972 so she would not have to brave blizzards, thunderstorms, icy sidewalks and frigid winter temperatures to use that little wooden one-seater shacklet in the backyard. Sure was hot in there in the summer and the couple visits in winter sure made one appreciative of our California indoor outhouse!!!!
Met up with Hwy 30 headed east in Wyoming purdy’ close to the Little America site, another “institution” well-known to the USA traveling public who have made the US 30/I-80 trek.
US 30 CAN be used in Wyoming to get off I-80 and avoid the at-times scary passage near Elk Mountain where the wind-driven snows can be precarious and the white-outs downright dreadful.
Back in the old days, when many sections of I-80 were yet to be built, US 30 was the only open roadway. Much more “history” to view/experience as one traveled through Medicine Bow, WY and many other smaller towns now bypassed by I-80.
Blair, NE, where MANY of the kinfolk resided back in the old days (and some still do) is still on US 30 and a half-hour north of I-80.
US 30 generally parallels I-80 across much of Nebraska but towards the eastern section US 30 trends away towards the northeast.
Follow US 30 if you want to experience a more rural and small town with regional larger non-city towns that are centers for surrounding small towns aspect of America that is often “declining.”
Tendencies to population losses and increasing poverty.
Also notable trekking those areas is the “sameness” brought to the USA via the growth and spread of “corporateness.” Fewer sole-proprieterships as the “Wal-Martization” of the USA continues.
Small towns that once possessed a few local retail outlets now depend upon the Wal-Mart up to an hour away where locals trek to weekly or monthly or whatever where quantities of foodstuffs etc are purchased.
Short-term consumables are thus unavailable (milk, etc) or are acquired locally from non-traditional (to you city slickers) sources.
Something to consider…. the Interstate system has had HUGE effects on MANY aspects of the USA from cultural to social, etc.
Okay.
We returneth thee to thine regularly scheduled schedule of whatever the heck yer were doing before the Disgruntled Old Coot turned his brainlet back to an era so different in many ways.
Can you imagine a time where the licence plate was only a 54?!!!!!!!!!
Wow , this post and the comments made me register to leave a comment!!!. It’s amazing how some experiences are the same no matter where you come from. I am from middle east and my father had ( and still has!) a 1977 Peugeot 504 , and on those long trips to the north of the country I used to lay in the package shelf (exactly as jpcavanaugh described , however , I don’t really know how I managed to fit there) and look at the stars and I was having fun maybe more that any other time in my life!!
Notice no obese folks back then? It’s amazing how skinny the average Joe was even back in the 70s.
In the early 1980s the US and Canada food guides were revised to reduce fat (and meats and veg) and increase breads and grains. This change pretty much corresponded the with the spike in production and consumption of corn syrups in just about damn-near everything.
People eat much more sugar and carbs and much less fat and protein than they used to. Consequently, they get fat and develop diabetes.
The average Joe was malnourished more often than not, and if he did get enough to eat regularly he worked it off in some blue-collar hellhole that would leave him a wreck by age 50.
I drive the old roads for fun, my main past-time.
I really like the car with the windshield shade, and side shades.
The water into radiator out of teapot, that is scary. Cars were not reliable then. Sure, you could fix them, but you had to.
We made a annual summer pilgrimage up most of I-5 most years when I was a kid (late sixties and early seventies). We played “leader of the pack” which basically consisted of goading our dad to not let anyone pass him. If he got passed, we were no longer leader of the pack unless we passed them back or they exited the interstate. Fun times.
But the most interesting thing, and actually quite common, was getting passed by a group of motorcycles, mostly choppers. We always decided these were Hells Angels, and no doubt some of them were. Some of these groups were really big, and we would count 60 or more bikers. We never worried about not being leader of the pack with those guys.
Nice find there Paul!
This was quite a fun set of photos you found!
Very interesting how people traveled the highways and byways back then. I have a book called, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches by Phillip Langdon, now out of print, I found a copy via Amazon several years ago, a nice condition used book that came from a library in Dixon CA and was removed from the collection by the library and is about the early days of the franchise system, talking about how it all began when travelers by train had difficulty finding decent food quickly near the tracks when dining aboard was not available to the development of the fast food joint etc. Very interesting and in there it talks about the early hotel/motel development, the Googie coffee shop era etc.
Not a stranger to traveling without electronics. My parents were lucky enough to have an AM radio, if they even used it on long trips, I was too young to remember anything beyond some bare memories of the trip back out to Washington St in the late 60’s as I was only 4 when we took the trek back out here in 1969 when my Dad got his final assignment where he was asked where he’d like to retire from the Air Force (I do recall staying in several Holiday Inns along the journey back). We’d moved out here in 1964 in a then brand new ’64 Dodge 330 station wagon with AC, push button AM radio, 2 standard seat belts, dad had the rest of the positions fitted with them at extra cost, came with a roof rack, full wheel covers and a basic interior as we bought it new in Jacksonville Fl for the initial trip out to Washington State where my family still lives (Dad got stationed at McChord AFB at the time).
I grew up entertaining myself when we went on these long trips, we stopped using the old wagon for long journeys after the transmission gave out in ’73 just outside of Yakima Washington, by the mid 70’s, the old wagon had some 140K miles on it and although it ran in its last few years, it was not without breaking down periodically. We sold it in ’76 I think, perhaps as late as ’77. As I got older, I would bring my tape recorder and ear/headphones and would listen to music of my choosing on the trips to the ocean or wherever if I didn’t actually read, but mostly just looked out at the scenery as it flew by.
I will agree that traveling today is much easier than in the past when our cars can withstand the long journeys without breaking down, especially during the summers and that getting to say Medford OR from Tacoma now takes a mere 8 hours down I-5 and back in ’64, I-5 through Tacoma was still under construction to a degree and was finally finished in 1971 when the last section was completed to allow for easy travel between Tacoma and Seattle.
I remember as a kid thinking the 45 minute-hour trip into Seattle from Tacoma took much longer than it does now that I traverse that span frequently and now with the traffic often, getting home and parked (on the street) in a bit over an hour is a bit of a wonder when traffic can drag that out an extra 30 minutes easily.
Still, seeing how people traveled is very interesting indeed. I have wanted to do a major road trip, say the old Route 66 with the old truck I drive now, but finances have kept that from happening, not that my ’92 Ranger wouldn’t have done it just fine, but being able to save for it was an impossibility under my current income – and I’d have had to get the AC system converted and recharged if doing it during the summer months.
We did a couple of road trips from western WA to upstate NY in the 1950 Packard 4-door. Luggage and pillows between the seats to make a larger area in the back for us kids to play in. We saw our first Wyoming thunderstorm at night…talk about feeling small and insignificant!
When I sold my 69 Valiant 318 4-speed to a guy in Wisconsin, I drove it to him. Stayed on I-90 until I got sick of the road and the self-service gas stations with “attendants” behind bullet-proof glass; found a two-lane highway in eastern Montana that took me east-southeast down through North and South Dakota and stayed on it all the way to the Twin Cities. Great ride, real gas stations, able to maintain high speeds except near the relatively few towns, scenery the same as on the interstate. I did have one bittersweet moment in South Dakota; passed a pristine mid-60’s Nova coupe, no radio, dog-dish hubcaps, driver in his 80’s or 90’s with a big German shepherd sitting at attention in the passenger seat; it flashed through my mind that perhaps the dog was his only companion. All in all, I’ll take the two-lane when I get a chance and have the time.
We grew up slightly later than that generation, but our driving was similar. Imagine 9 people in a Rambler station wagon. There were always kids laying down in the back. In fact, that was often more comfortable than dodging elbows in the seats. There weren’t nearly enough seat belts so they went unused, which lead to an exciting few moments when my mother passed out and drove off a bridge. Amazingly we all survived, most with only cuts and bruises, though my just born baby sister spent a scary week in the hospital.