Chapter 39 - 1972 & 1973 Road Trips

Chapter 39 Version 2

1972

John liked traveling. For the abrasive company he worked for after 1978 when he graduated with an MBA from Ohio University, he had traveled to Texas and Canada and would also go just over the border into a plant in Mexico near Brownsville. In a job he took when he graduated from RPI, he logged many automobile miles covering West Virginia as a fire protection engineer for an insurance company. He was infected by the travel bug in college when fraternity brothers presented him with opportunities to take a number of long distance road trips.

On spring break in 1972, two fraternity brothers, Ned and Ron, wanted to go visit their homes in Lynchburg Virginia and in Milwaukee Wisconsin. Traveling with their girl friends and another fraternity brother, Bill, they were taking two cars and had room for another person who could help drive. The bonus on the trip was that it could be routed from Lynchburg through Louisville to get to Milwaukee. John could get to visit his girlfriend and wife to be Mary. In the fall of 1971, Mary was a freshman at Green Mountain College in Vermont. She came down with two other GMC girls with fraternity brother Ken to see a Blood, Sweat & Tears concert at RPI and met John. The BS&T concert included a warm up by an unknown singer/songwriter named Don McLain. The venue went wild when McLain performed “American Pie” which in a few weeks became a huge hit on the radio.

In the summer of 1972, fraternity brother Larry had been given the ok to take his mother’s station wagon on a trip to California if he had a traveling companion. When invited, John quickly agreed without a thought of how to pay for the expenses on the trip. His father Joe was more pragmatic and extracted $350 from John’s older sister Susan who was teaching kindergarten in the Easthampton Public Schools. Equipped with enough cash to live on bologna sandwiches, John and Larry headed west in early June. They had a fraternity brother passenger Dave, to drop off in Cleveland. Dave would later be encountered at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado on the drive back from California.

Phi Sigma Kappa had over a hundred fraternity houses across the country. Between fraternity houses, relatives, and fraternity brothers, Larry and John headed ever farther west to Milwaukee, the South Dakota Badlands and Mount Rushmore. Coming down from Mt. Rushmore, Larry made a good decision to spend the night on a scenic overview a few miles from the town of Keystone as it was raining so hard, he couldn’t see the winding mountain road. The flash flood that hit the Rapid City area dropped as much as 15 inches of water in a six hour period. 232 people were killed in the flood including 10 in Keystone a few miles down the mountain road. Larry had called home from Rushmore the night before and his family had told him to go back to Rapid City and get a motel room to keep out of the rain that night. Larry’s parents woke up the next day and saw the headline in the New York Post “Life Ripped From Black Hills”. John’s mother had a bad feeling that night and spent time praying for John that night. Since all of the phone lines ran through Rapid City, there was no calling home until Yellowstone Park was reached the next evening.

From Yellowstone, the trip went through Salt Lake City, Reno, Berkley and Oakland where the A’s played the Detroit Tigers.  Detroit ‘s long time star Al Kaline led Detroit to the AL championship series that year. The A’s won against Detroit and went on to win the world series in 1972 with the likes of Bert Campaneris, Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi and Sal Bando lead by an all star pitching staff including Ken Holtzman, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter and Blue Moon Odom. They then stayed at John’s uncle Lewis’ home in Sunnyvale. From cousin Mary Jane’s apartment in San Francisco, John and Larry headed south down the coast highway past Big Sur to San Luis Obispo. There they went inland to search for the Visalia Mets. Larry’s father was the sports editor at the New York Post and Larry was a big New York sports fan. Finding that the Mets were playing the Fresno Giants in Fresno, they headed up the central valley in search of baseball. The next day, the search changed to big trees. It was off to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks with spectacular trees. Then it was down through Bakersfield to Pasadena where fraternity brother Dennis’ family generously housed the two as they saw the sights of LA including Disneyland with Dennis. Then it was out through the desert where John’s father Joe had waited to go to the Pacific War. But John’s destination was Las Vegas and the midnight show at the Stardust.

By this time, the pair had seen many of the great wonders of nature. Passing over the Hoover Dam to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, they pulled up to the edge of the canyon, got out of the car without closing the doors and exclaimed “That is one big hole!” before jumping back into the car and heading east to the four corners area and into Colorado. After stopping to see Mesa Verde, the AAA triptik took “a scenic drive through the Rockies” which was an understatement. US 50 became John’s favorite US highway. Fraternity brother Dave who had been dropped off in Cleveland was taking an ecology class in Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park. The duo shared Dave’s tent for a week while enjoying the scenery. Then it was east across Kansas and Missouri to Louisville to stop and visit Mary and go to Mammoth Cave National Park. The final destination before Easthampton was to Worcester Massachusetts where fraternity brother Tony was marrying college sweet heart Paula.

Upon John’s return to Easthampton, his cioci Faye made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Cousin Marty wanted to move back to Miami and drive her convertible car down. His aunt offered to fly him back if he accompanied Marty in her drive. When sister Sue heard of this road trip, she signed on too. With one stop at cousin Chris’ house in Virginia Beach, it was a long drive to Miami. For John, the route back of course needed to go through Louisville. He bought her some tiny carved ivory animals at the Miami flea market before John and Sue bussed up to Orlando for a day at Disney World. They then bussed up to Louisville before flying back to Albany for a summer fraternity party in Troy. The common intersection of all three of the 1972 road trips was Louisville.

Travel continued in 1973 for John. Spring break brought a road trip with fraternity brother Ken to Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ken’s magic suitcase accompanied the group on their travels.

After graduation, Ken in his pickup truck and camper along with John and fraternity brother Len, headed up to Canada before they started their real world jobs that summer. John delayed starting his job as a fire protection engineer for Factory Insurance Association until early July. The Canada trip started in Montreal with a tour of the Molson brewery and then moved to Quebec and Laurentides Provincial Park. Len became attached to a moose skull he found and it accompanied the campers home. Crossing the Saint Laurence River, the campers drove around the top of Maine through the Gaspe and into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. A tourist trap called “Magnetic Hill” was experienced in Moncton. Beautiful scenery was in store on the Cabot Trail around Cape Breton Island in the north of Nova Scotia. A stop at Glace Bay yielded an underground tour of a coal mine by a grisly old retired miner. The miner said the only time he was concerned mining coal in a seam out under the ocean was when the seam became so thin that he couldn’t turn over his shovel. Then it was down the east coast of Nova Scotia through Halifax, Peggy’s Cove and over to the Bay of Fundy. A place called “The Rocks” produced natural sculptures of eroded rocks topped with trees in the huge tidal changes in the Bay of Fundy. The camper then received a rest during a ferry  voyage from Digby Nova Scotia to St Johns New Brunswick. Crossing back into Maine, Len was sent to assure the US customs official that we had no contraband including Canadian liquor. The official commented that you could hide just about anything in the camper and opened the cabinet full of hard liquor. From his vantage point the official did not see the bottles and waved the camper through. From there it was down to Westerly Rhode Island and a fishing excursion out on John’s uncle Stanley’s 27 foot fiberglass fishing boat “Chipee”. Stanley would never loose his love for the ocean and would pilot his boat out to Block Island and “The Race” off the eastern end of Long Island. He and Jeanette looked forward to their two day weekly stays at their cozy apartment upstairs at the Avondale Boat Yard on the Pawcatuck River near Watch Hill.

Neither of these trips took him to Louisville so John with a couple of weeks before he started his job in Pittsburgh left for a solo trip to Kentucky. On this trip Mary was not a stop on a trip to somewhere else. She was the destination. He returned to start his job in Hartford only to find that he was expected to drive that day to Harrisburg on his way to Pittsburgh.

Back home in Easthampton, Joe had done enough traveling and ocean voyaging for a lifetime. He preferred to stay home and tend his garden, giving away his ample crop to his friends and family. Jane had been to California with sister Nancy to help out when sister Sophie died of cancer. She had never been out of the country. When Stanley offered to include Jane and Joe on a vacation trip to the Canary Islands given by one of his suppliers, Joe declined the offer. Jane asked if she could go and take a friend along. Joe changed his mind and came along on the trip. There were two alternate dates available one week apart and so the people traveling in the group voted and chose the earlier date. The vote was close. The flight not chosen crashed into the sea upon takeoff on the return flight with all of the passengers and crew lost. Timing is everything. The experiences we have give rise to stories that are passed down to future generations. Lest we forget.