Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  It was there that I discovered two reliable things about McDonald’s that benefitted me for the next 10,000 miles: You can count on every McDonald’s to have strong, free Wi-Fi that you can use for as long as you want any time of day. And you can count on finding a local gang of 4 to 6 wise old guys in bad hats who will be thrilled to answer a stranger’s questions about what their world was like in 1960.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Friday, Sept. 30, 1960 – Lancaster, N.H.

  After sleeping in his truck in the middle of Maine, Steinbeck says in the book that he drives ''long and furiously'' all day Friday to get back to Lancaster, New Hampshire, which he had passed through earlier in the week on U.S. 2 going east to Bangor. He says he sleeps in his camper at a ''ghost'' motel/lunch counter by the Connecticut River because, though the office is open, no one is around to rent him a cabin. Since leaving Deer Isle two days before, he had driven about 600 miles.

  Where Steinbeck Really Slept

  It poured most of the 100 miles to Lancaster, which along with northern Vermont was about to be flooded with 4 inches of rain over the next two days. My missions of the day were to be interviewed by Scott Simon and to find out as much as I could about the mysterious “ghost” motel Steinbeck described in “Travels With Charley.”

  Steinbeck left behind some good clues about where he stayed in Lancaster and, as I would soon learn through the serendipitous ways of drive-by journalism, a mystery. He says in “Charley” that after a hard day of driving he arrived before sundown at a group of white cabins by an iron bridge over the Connecticut River. It was Friday, Sept. 30, 1960, the day after he spent his lonely rainy night by the concrete bridge in Maine.

  Steinbeck wrote a long, informative letter to his wife that evening. Sadly reporting that no one was around to share a drink with him, he summed up Maine as “a big empty place where people have been – and gone.” He took two cheap swipes at Richard Nixon, who had been campaigning in Maine earlier that day. Then he wrote, “Tomorrow night I will probably put up at a motel for the sake of a bath and if I find one with a phone I will call you.”

  In Lancaster he also whipped off a postcard to his agent Elizabeth Otis. Maine was a “big, big place,” he wrote in his pinched scrawl, “and lots of those lumber roads are lonely.” As for what he’d learned on his trip, he said, “So far I have no ideas – none whatsoever. But I do get very tired. Perhaps it’s from trying to take in too much.” He closed with “I’m down on the N.H. Vt. line now and headed west tomorrow.” The postcard was postmarked the next day, Oct. 1, in Concord, Vermont, 20 miles west on U.S. 2.

  A woman I had met on my first pass through Lancaster had insisted that Steinbeck’s ghost motel was part of a long-gone place on the Connecticut River near Concord. In a heavy downpour, I drove for Concord to check out her theory. It was almost time for my phone date at 2:30 with Scott Simon of “Weekend Edition Saturday.”

  In the Smart Phone Age you’d think doing a radio interview would be simple and could be done anywhere. But NPR producer Peter Breslow had said cell phones were too iffy and I’d need a landline to ensure sound quality. On U.S. 2 in Lunenburg, Vermont, I stopped at the Lunenburg Variety Store to use a pay phone to call Breslow, who’d then tell Scott Simon where to call me.

  Unfortunately, the only public phone in town stood wet and naked in the middle of the variety store’s parking lot. It was more like a public shower, plus it had no phone number I could give Breslow. With only minor begging and explaining, I persuaded storeowner Mary Lou Ingalls to let me use her private phone – the one over by the meat slicer.

  I called Breslow and gave him the store’s number. Scott Simon phoned me – and the call dropped. Twice. Simon and I eventually talked for 15 minutes. In a nutshell, I told him that 95 percent of what I had seen along U.S. Highways 5, 2 and 1 Steinbeck would have seen as well. Simon was as personable in person as he is on your kitchen radio. Two days later, when the interview would publicize my adventure on NPR from coast to coast, I should have been very pleased. But when I would hear it, I’d be disappointed and very annoyed.

  After hanging up with my new friend Scott, I told storeowner Ingalls why I was headed to Concord. No way, she said. Steinbeck’s ghost motel wasn’t there. It was in Lancaster along U.S. 2, near the iron bridge over the Connecticut River. Where a sprawling RV park, gas station and truck stop were now.

  Back I went through the monsoon to Lancaster. The owner/operator of the Beaver Trails RV Park and Munce’s Convenience store did not remember what her place looked like in 1960, mainly because she didn’t exist then. She sent me across U.S. 2 to talk to Mike and Sally Beattie, who once owned the property. In her busy basement home-office I handed Sally Beattie my copy of "Travels With Charley" and asked her to read the passages describing the ghost motel.

  That's the Whip 'o Will Cabins, Sally confidently proclaimed. It had six small cabins, a little office, a larger house and a barn. Everything was long gone except one cabin, which was out in the swamp that was becoming a pond in the back of the Beatties’ house/farm/business complex. The cabin had been moved across the road from the Whip o' Will site decades ago and was being used as a storage shed. I asked if I could check it out. Sally said sure, so into the deluge I splashed to take photos of a cabin just like the one Steinbeck said he didn't sleep in.

  Sally Beattie wasn’t done helping me. While I was outside she grabbed a phone book and looked up the numbers of three locals who could tell me more about the motel's history. The only person who answered his phone was Jeff Woodburn. He was a local freelancer, ex-politician, sometime social-studies teacher and rental property owner. For months he had been working on a New Hampshire Magazine article about what John Steinbeck really did in the fall of 1960 when he came through the Lancaster area. I was afraid Woodburn might not want to share his scoops with a pushy out-of-town big-city journalist. But he couldn't have been more generous. Plus he dropped what to an amateur Steinbeck-hunter like me was a bombshell.

  You’ll Need a Tie, Mr. Steinbeck

  On one of his stops in Lancaster, Jeff Woodburn said, Steinbeck stayed nearby at the Spalding Inn, then a super-exclusive mountaintop hotel/retreat. Not only that, but remember the Adlai Stevenson-like Yankee farmer/political scientist in “Charley” that Steinbeck said he met in the White Mountains? Woodburn said he didn’t exist. Neither did his farm.

  Woodburn learned about Steinbeck's clandestine stay at the Spalding Inn by accident. Assuming that what was in “Charley” was actually true, he had set out to find the wise local Yankee farmer who discussed the geopolitical news of the day with Steinbeck. “I searched and searched and talked to a lot of people,” Woodburn said. “I grew up here and have a lot of contacts. I should have been able to find him, but I couldn’t find that White Mountains farmer.”

  Woodburn was disappointed – and felt a little betrayed. “He built up this farmer on all bullshit. To me, it was a composite of several people.” When he realized the local farmer did not exist, he asked on a local Facebook page if anyone remembered John Steinbeck passing through the area in 1960. Several people told him the same story: Steinbeck had a room at the Spalding Inn. He didn't socialize and kept busy with some writing. When he tried to enter the dining room for dinner he was refused entrance. He lacked the proper attire, as they used to say at such stuffy old-fashioned inns. When he told them who he was, they quickly rounded up a coat and tie for him.

  The Spalding Inn is high in the woods of the White Mountains about 7 miles south of Lancaster in Whitefield. It describes itself – without doing its gloriously old-fashioned character enough justice – on its Web site: "Surrounded by manicured lawns, orchards, perennial gardens and a 360-degree view of the Presidential Mountain range, it offers you the perfect escape from city life."

  Woodburn offered to meet me at the inn, which was owned by the producers of the TV show “Ghost Hunters,” and in 1960 catered to the rich and privileged of New York and Europe. Over a beer in the dank basement bar of the oth
erwise empty and strange inn we shared our esoteric Steinbeck knowledge.

  Despite its many un-modern charms and reasonable $140 per-night price, the Spalding Inn had only ghosts eating in its spacious and formal dining room. With leaf-peeping season over, there were more friendly employees than overnight guests. When Woodburn and I were led down a hall and shown a room the inn might have given Steinbeck, "The Shining" came to mind.

  Months afterwards, back in Pittsburgh, I called Iris Glidden, 87. She was the Spalding Inn’s owner’s secretary in the fall of 1960. She didn’t see Steinbeck herself, but said he showed up in a plaid shirt and expected to be able to eat dinner in the dining room. "The story is," Iris said, "he was told he had to dress properly if he wanted to eat. It's probably true. It was a very exclusive place for the wealthy in those days." She said Steinbeck had a dog with him and that it probably had to stay in Steinbeck's car (camper) overnight. Did Steinbeck definitely sleep overnight at the Spalding Inn? "Oh yes, he did,” Iris said. “I'm sure of that. Only one night. He probably stayed through breakfast and cleared out.”

  Donald Spalding, the son of the original owners and operators of the inn, confirmed Glidden's account. He said there is no doubt Steinbeck ate dinner and slept at the inn during "foliage season" 1960. It's a 50-year-old story, part of the inn's rich lore, he told me over the phone. "I heard the story from my parents. He was traveling with his dog Charley and didn't socialize. He checked in, ate and kept to himself. He stayed the night."

  Case closed. It's safe to conclude Steinbeck slept at the Spalding Inn during his "Charley" trip. Given that he made up his evening with the Yankee farmer, the best guess is he stayed at the inn Sunday, Sept. 25, 1960, on his way east to Bangor. Steinbeck wrote a letter to his wife from St. Johnsbury, Vermont, that evening but provided no clues about his lodging. He easily, and logically, could have driven another 30 miles east and checked into the Spalding Inn.

  Furthermore, there's little doubt Steinbeck was at the Whip 'o Will Cabins by the Connecticut River on Friday, Sept. 30, 1960. He all but says he’s there in his letter to his wife that night. In a road letter the next night – Saturday, Oct. 1 – he told her he was staying at a trailer park but didn’t say where it was. He was probably somewhere to the west in Upstate New York, so he didn’t spend that night at the Spalding Inn, either. But it doesn't really matter what night it was. Jeff Woodburn had discovered proof of Steinbeck making up people and places and leaving out the truth. By the time I left the New Hampshire-Vermont border, I was operating under the assumption that everything in “Travels With Charley” was fiction until proved otherwise.

  8 – Escape From New England

  … I cannot commend this account as an America that you will find. So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Saturday, Oct. 1, 1960 – Upstate New York

  In the morning Steinbeck crosses the iron bridge over the Connecticut River on U.S. Highway 2 west, bound for the northwest corner of Vermont, Upstate New York, Niagara Falls and ultimately Chicago and his wife Elaine. In a letter written late that Saturday night, he tells his wife he had pulled into "this trailer park." He doesn’t say what state he is in, but unless he drove only 160 miles that entire day and stopped for the night before he left Vermont soil, it had to be somewhere along U.S. 11 in Upstate New York.

  Eating in the Dark

  My prayers for a sign of neon were answered by a humble family diner in Nowheresville, New York. Actually, it wasn't neon that lit up my dark world. And actually it was not Nowheresville. It was Churubusco, which is on U.S. Highway 11 in the middle of Clinton County in rural Upstate New York.

  I was hot on Steinbeck’s cold trail. He left New Hampshire Saturday, Oct. 1, 1960, for points west. I did the same on Friday, Oct. 1, 2010, riding down U.S. 2 in heavy rain as it twisted through soggy green Vermont. Montpelier and the rest of the state had been pounded with 36 hours of rain. As I followed the gorged Winooski River I did a 60-minute phone interview with talk-show guy Bob Smith of NPR station WRUR in Rochester, New York. An angry churning brown snake, the Winooski scoured the bottom of every bridge and turned the lowlands into shallow lakes as it rushed to Lake Champlain.

  In Vermont I had originally planned to swing down to Middlebury to interview Middlebury College professor Jay Parini. The author of the 1995 Steinbeck bio “John Steinbeck: A Biography” was up for it. But despite our emails and phone messages, when I was within striking distance of Middlebury he was out of town and I was hurrying west. Too bad I didn’t meet biographer Parini. In 1997 he also wrote an introduction for a paperback edition of “Travels With Charley.” Though he pointed out its fictional elements, he treated “Charley” in the introduction the same way he did in his biography – as if was a true account.

  Actually, Parini tried to have it both ways. First he writes in the introduction that “the fictional aspects of ‘Travels With Charley’ are noticeable on most pages, the chief of these being the use of dialogue.” Ten paragraphs later he quotes the cab driver Steinbeck supposedly talked to in New Orleans as if the cabbie’s bigoted talk about New York Jews causing all the trouble and stirring “the niggers up” was a true and factual event indicative of the racist South.

  Parini and other academics argue that Steinbeck’s fictionalizing – i.e., lying – in a nonfiction book doesn’t matter because he was telling greater truths – in this case portraying the extent of bigotry in the South. Of course, that “truth-telling” begs some questions. At what point do all the fictions discredit his book’s value as an accurate and honest account of reality? And at what point do all those phony quotes from dozens of made-up characters in a nonfiction book add up to literary fraud?

  I wanted to ask Parini what he thought about what I was learning about Steinbeck’s fictions and deceptions, but it didn’t happen. Six months later Parini became one of the Steinbeck scholars who told the New York Times my discovery of Steinbeck’s serial fictionalizing and fibbing in “Travels With Charley” was no big literary deal.

  Not seeing Middlebury College’s campus was also a disappointment. My dad went there during World War II as part of the Navy’s V-12 training program for commissioned officers. It would have changed his life and probably precluded mine from being conceived, but he flunked out after a year because he couldn’t handle the calculus. Being a star second baseman on the college team didn’t save him. He raved often to me about Middlebury’s beautiful campus, which he never saw again after 1944. Since my dad died in 2008, I had been carrying his Navy dog tags on my key ring. When I got to the Middlebury campus I was going to take a photo of his tags somewhere really important – maybe at the baseball field on second base.

  In Burlington, the sun returned from its vacation. I experienced my first serious traffic jam since Manhattan near the airport and whatever university all the kids in the bike lanes were attending. Bike lanes: That’s something else Steinbeck didn’t see in 1960. It took me a while to realize it was Friday evening rush hour. I faithfully followed the U.S. Route 2 signs through pre-1960 working-class neighborhoods in Burlington and through the squared-off rotary of downtown Winooski, where the enraged and throttled Winooski River looked like it was going to take out the bridge.

  Vermont was the same old story. Except for some new malls and offices on U.S. 2 on the way into Burlington, the Steinbeck Highway was as empty, rural and pretty as when its namesake saw it. I hopped across Lake Champlain on skimpily populated and barely developed South and North Hero islands. Under a cloud-filtered sunset I zipped past the islands’ parks, marinas, farms, handsome/shabby old houses and pricy vacation homes facing the water. Just before the Canadian border, I hung a hard left and took the bridge to Rouses Point, New York, which was where Steinbeck crossed into Upstate New York and met the northern terminus of U.S. Highway 11.
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  Steinbeck plotted a beautiful if eccentric route for his circumnavigation of America. He stayed close to rivers, lakes and oceans and as far away from big industrial cities as he could. And he deliberately avoided the nascent interstate system, choosing instead what we and William Least Heat-Moon today romantically call “Blue Highways.”

  The roads on the Old Steinbeck Highway – U.S. Routes 5, 2, 1, 11, 20, 12, 10, 101 and 66 – were the two-lane interstates of their day. They were what tourists followed, trucks ran on and the early commerce of travel clung to. The highways cut straight through the downtown hearts of cities like Rochester and Buffalo and became the main streets of small towns from Calais to Amarillo.

  Except maybe in the boondocks and deserts, in 1960 there was nothing lonely or quiet or safe about the Blue Highways. They were often worn, bumpy, high-traffic death traps – narrow, shoulder-free, poorly painted and lighted. And they didn’t have 24-hour rest stops every 13 miles where you knew you could fill up on gas, coffee and humanity when you ran low. Today the Blue Highways are much safer and smoother because most of their traffic has shifted to the interstates.