By Michal Patrick O’Brien–
Stuck here at home during the now-ended pandemic-plagued year of 2020, I really have not gone anywhere in a long time. Just as cabin fever was setting in, I stumbled on a file of old newspaper articles I had collected a while ago. It was a fortuitous discovery, the story of my grandparents’ marathon driving trips across the United States in the late 1950s.
My grandparents Donald Raymond O’Brien and Florence Duffy O’Brien were intrepid adventurers. Sixty years ago last fall, they launched what would be their first 7 month long driving trip, on the cusp of winter, with both of them well into their 60s. And this was unlike any long driving trip we would take today. The convenient United States interstate highway system was funded by Congress only in 1956, and it was not quite in place yet.
The trip is part of family lore, not just because they pulled it off (twice), but because my grandfather Donald was a retired reporter/columnist for his hometown newspaper, the Burlington Free Press. His former employer asked Donald to come out of retirement and document their motor journey in the O’Brien little blue wagon.
The inaugural trip article, published on October 14, 1958, announced the trip and the planned itinerary. Leaving from Burlington in New England, the roving O’Briens planned stops on the eastern side of the country to visit some of their adult children who had moved away. This included a stop in Syracuse, New York to visit my uncle (and fellow lawyer) David, and a drive to Wheeling, West Virginia to see their oldest daughter, my aunt Maureen—also known as Sister Christine because she had joined a Carmelite convent.
The next two legs of the trip included Louisiana, where the O’Brien elders planned to visit my parents and their three children (my ETA was still three years away), and then a long haul to visit the youngest O’Brien daughter—Rita O’Brien Baldarelli—who lived with her growing family in Sacramento, California. There were no news articles from Don for about two months, so the grand-travelers must have been busy catching up on family matters.
Not surprisingly, my grandfather’s first trip report, sent in from Arizona, addressed fishing. This was his favorite pastime with my grandmother—referred to in his articles as his “Constant Companion.” Parched in Arizona, they asked the Vermont news editor to send them a “Hunk of Champlain,” meaning Lake Champlain on which they had their beloved Vermont fishing cabin.
Don’s first article reported that the arid western desert did not present many chances to use his fly rod, except perhaps at the goldfish pond near his Arizona vacation community. His only concern about that option, however, was that hotel “management counts these fish every night.”
By February 1959, the O’Briens had reached Sacramento, where their daughter Rita lived, and were ready to lodge another news report. This one explained how they had met few native Californians, but lots of other wandering New Englanders in the Wild West. One such wanderer warned them not to trying fishing in California just yet—February was too cold. My grandfather wryly observed that if back at his Vermont lake abode, he’d be “cutting through a couple of feet of ice” to fish in “below-zero cold.”
By mid-February 1959, the roving retired reporter and his Constant Companion still had fish on their minds. They visited a hatchery near Folsom, California and stood there “google-eyed, looking at millions of king salmon and steelheads—without ever wetting a line.” The rest of the article is filled with meaty (or should I say fishy?) details about the famous hatchery.
The two O’Briens found some distraction from their fishing blues with a late February 1959 visit to San Francisco. Living on a bit of an incline on Maple Street back home in Burlington did not prepare them for the steep streets of the city by the bay. Don wrote, “On our first trip up one of these hills in our little blue wagon, we felt like a couple of flies going up a wall. I made the mistake of looking back down (my Constant Companion was at the wheel.) One glimpse of that drop and my stomach left me right there and didn’t catch up until we hit a level street again.”
March 1959 was the time for newsy reports on their adventures in Southern California. The couple enjoyed a Twentieth Century Fox back lot tour from an old press agent/friend and watched some filming for the new movie Holiday for Lovers, starring actress Jane Wyman. They also marveled at the amazing hillside homes of Malibu, but never mentioned the latest SoCal attraction of Disneyland, which had opened just four years before in nearby Anaheim.
Driving further south, past the swallows at San Juan Capistrano and into the temperate sunshine of San Diego, the O’Brien elders summarized the pros and cons of their three months in the Golden State. A pro? “Broad, clean beaches, spacious and well-equipped marinas, public fishing piers, and other recreational facilities.” A con? “We’d like to ship out a big supply of that fresh, clean, bracing Green Mountain air.”
In April 1959, almost six months after their trip started, Don and Florence finally were able to tell some fishing stories—from Lake Mead—to their Vermont audience. Unimpressed with the high costs of local boat rentals or by the small size of the crappies or largemouth bass they hauled in, they nonetheless enjoyed the experience.
Don explained, “To one accustomed to the wooded lakes and streams of Vermont, fishing this man-made lake is a fantastic experience. The desert comes right down to the water—all around. Sand and rocks, and maybe mesquite or sagebrush back from the shore.” As for the bait they used? He noted a Vermont night crawler would look like a “boa constrictor” compared to “these wee little worms.”
Their fishing itch now scratched, in May 1959 the O’Briens used their little blue wagon to check off the next several items on their itinerary: a brief stop in Mexico; gambling in Las Vegas; a month-long stay in the high desert of Boulder City, Nevada; pueblos in New Mexico; and a national park visit in Southern Utah.
After logging 11,000 driving miles, the trusty “Blue-bird”—as Don called it—had car trouble in Wyoming on a road where “service stations are scarcer’n feathers on a frog.” Luckily, as Don reported in his May 7, 1959 news story, a kind cement truck driver stopped to help. The driver took them to a garage and a mechanic travelled back to the car and fixed it there. When thanked profusely by the O’Briens, the Good Samaritan told my grandfather, “Think nothing of it, pal, help the next guy.”
On May 26, 1959, the Burlington Free Press reported that the “tumbleweed travelers” had finally made it back home after logging 13,102 miles following a “circuitous” and “spur-of-the-moment” itinerary. The roving Vermonters enjoyed the marathon trip so much that in 1960, they completed a similar 13,317 mile driving adventure, this time starting with several months in Florida before again making the round trip to California and back.
The grandparents did not see my parents on this second jaunt. In 1960, my folks were in Orleans, France on an Air Force assignment and waiting for me to arrive in early 1961. Brave as they were, not even Don and Florence O’Brien were willing navigate the Atlantic Ocean with just their trusty little blue wagon.
I can forgive them for this omission. They more than made up for it 60 years later in 2020, when they took me on a much-needed virtual vacation.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.
