Remembering Dad - Part 2: "The Driver"

In the summer of 1960, my family took a cross-country road trip from Canandaigua, New York to Pasadena and back.  Six of us – my parents, and me (age 9) and my three sisters – Kendra (13), Carol (12) and Christine (7) in a mint-green Chevy station wagon.

It was a great adventure.

In the summer of 2005, the Chicago Tribune in their Tempo section asked for readers to share their summer vacation road trip adventures.  On a lark I submitted the poem I had just written for a poetry class I was taking.

To my surprise, the Tribune contacted me and told me they wanted to feature the poem in their article and asked if I had any photos to share. Yes, we did.  Several hundred actually. I would have included a photo of my dad driving, but he took all the photos. 

READERS RESPOND 'How we spent our summer vacations' Published August 26, 2005

Take a look at these photos from the car trip Len Joy and his family took across the country and back in July 1960, and they're likely to trigger your own memories of family auto journeys. And read the poem that Len, now 54, wrote about his father as driver then and today.

There's a mythic quality to the stories families tell about their long car trips together -- about breakdowns and June bugs, about wrong turns and queasy stomachs, about rubber-armed dads keeping order in the back seat (while still driving) and suitcases flying off the luggage rack onto the highway.

These are experiences that carve deep lines in the memory. Len was one of nearly 200 readers who wrote in with their accounts of car trips past, after Tempo writers shared theirs on Aug. 10.

THE DRIVER

I think about my father.

It is 1960 I am nine and we are on the vacation

we have talked about my whole life.

We have a mint green Chevy Wagon pulling a canvas tent trailer.

No radio, no seatbelts, no a/c. We add an air cooler in Albuquerque.

They say we’ll need it for the run across the Desert.

Six of us in that Wagon.

Mom and my three sisters and Me and Dad the Driver.

I always sit up front because I am the Boy.

From Canandaigua to Chicago then south.

Missouri…...Kansas…. Oklahoma….

We miss the twisters at Roman Nose but catch the rain in the Panhandle.

On to Gallup where my mom and Dad argue.

Up to Angel Lake in the Rockies.  The car overheats.

The road is narrow and winding.  I am scared.

We drive through Vegas at midnight.  So many lights.

We keep on rolling.  I sleep through the Desert.

I awake at the Flamingo Motel in Pasadena.

Disneyland is cool.

Knott’s Berry Farm is boring.

I like playing shuffleboard at the motel pool.

My Uncle takes us to the Beach.

The Ocean is too cold.  It knocks me down. 

I can’t get out.  I like the motel pool.

Then we turn around.

Wall Drug, the Corn Palace, Mount Rushmore (where I get lost).

Back through Chicago and all the way home.

Four weeks to California and back.

Seven thousand five hundred and forty-nine miles.

Dad drives Mom keeps track.

We come home and I grow up.

Dad goes to every lousy basketball game (home and away)

Even when we lose eighteen in a row.

Last summer my father turned 86.

I ask him to give up driving his car.

My sisters choose me because I was the Boy. 

He says he can drive better than most of those

Yahoos on the road today.

I agree.  But…

I can’t say what I need to say.

That he is in the final chapter of a great life. 

Why risk it all?

What if you fall asleep or pass out

or just lose control?

What if you kill someone?

But I can’t say that. 

He’s the Driver.