I passed cell towers every few miles and counted a dozen McDonald’s signs sticking in the air. In 1960 there were fewer than 100 McDonald’s in the country, not 13,000 like in 2010, so I doubt if Steinbeck ever passed one. He probably would have griped about the visual pollution from the “new” stuff I saw, especially the commercialization. But as a tinkerer and amateur inventor, I’m sure he’d have appreciated the simple genius of rumble strips, which every day save the lives of countless Americans who fall asleep on interstates because they’re so damn boring and safe.
9 – Pit-stopping in Pittsburgh
Steinbeck Timeline
Monday, Oct. 3, 1960 – Somewhere west of Ohio
Leaving Buffalo, Steinbeck takes his maiden interstate trip, driving 150 miles on I-90 to Erie and into Ohio, where the highway then ended at Madison. In “Travels With Charley” he says he picked up “the equally wide fast U.S. 20” at Madison and it carried him across northern Ohio “past Cleveland and Toledo, and so into Michigan.” He describes camping that night somewhere between Toledo and South Bend, Indiana. U.S. 20 almost touches the southern border of Michigan, where there are some lakes that might have attracted Steinbeck. No one knows where he really stopped, or if. It’s a mystery night. But Steinbeck was definitely not “sitting alone beside a lake in northern Michigan,” as he writes. “Northern Michigan” was clearly a geographic mistake Viking’s copyeditors missed.
My 1960
When John Steinbeck and Charley hurried past Erie, 120 miles to my north, I was 13 and living in a new housing plan on the edge of Pittsburgh’s exploding suburban frontier. At that time Pittsburgh, aka the “Arsenal of Democracy,” was still an industrial powerhouse, a clanging, crowded, productive city of smoke and fire and money that employed armies of unionized workingmen.
In the fall of 1960 you couldn’t see the corrosion that would soon turn “The Steel City” into the honorary capital of the Rust Belt and cut its metropolitan population by 400,000 in 50 years. Miles of steel mills and manufacturing plants and railroad tracks lined the dead Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers. Deepened and tamed by locks and dams to serve as canals for fleets of barges heaped with coal and coke and slag, the three rivers were industrial sewers laced with dozens of bridges and squeezed by healthy blue-collar steel towns like McKeesport and Clairton.
The city of Pittsburgh, population 604,000, was the hub of a vibrant metropolis of 2.7 million people. It was a big league town in every way. Wealthy and important, a national leader in cleaning up its infamously smoky air, it was the 12th biggest TV market in the country. It had been built on the brains of capitalist titans like Carnegie, Westinghouse and Mellon and the muscles of waves of Eastern European immigrants.
In 1960 it was the corporate home of industrial giants like U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Gulf Oil and Westinghouse. Its ex-mayor David L. Lawrence, who had just been elected Pennsylvania’s first Catholic governor, was known as “the maker of presidents” for the way he used his clout within the national Democratic Party to help FDR, Truman and JFK secure their presidential nominations.
I was the oldest of five Catholic baby-boomers – Bill, John, Paul and Dan sandwiched around my poor sister Mary. We lived on Raven Drive in a dangerously dense Catholic-Democrat housing plan packed with kids and dogs that everyone called “Birdland.” I was a B student who loved sports and devoured World War II books and news magazines. I didn’t know it then, but I was genetically and environmentally predestined to grow up and become an op-ed columnist. I was already a working member of the mainstream media, making $7 a week as an afternoon paperboy for the Pittsburgh Press, the second biggest paper in the state. I had 55 of its unluckiest customers.
My family wasn’t rich or poor, it was ordinary and normal. We had just about what everyone else had in the homogenized confines of Birdland. Besides five kids, we had a working dad, a stay-at-home mom, a dog, a five-year-old $20,000 brick house on a quarter-acre lot, four bedrooms, a dishwasher, a station wagon and a power mower. As a bonus, we had my Aunt Weeze, my mom’s sister, who lived with us and worked as a secretary at Gulf Oil, one of a dozen major corporations then headquartered in Pittsburgh. Plus we had Elizabeth Taylor – aka Lizzie. She was our maid who arrived by bus from Pittsburgh’s Hill District once a week and was paid $12 a day. Except for Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. on TV, Lizzie and the garbage men were the only black persons we regularly saw who weren’t on a local sports team. The civil rights movement was of no importance to our lives and the N-word was heard often among my friends.
It was a great time to grow up. There were too many kids per family for parents to over-parent, so we were always outside, adult-less and free. We played ball of some kind every day after school in the crowded streets. We built our own baseball fields after the bulldozers graded farmland for more new homes. We rode our bikes as far from home as we could go and still make it back for dinner. We became professionals in petty vandalism. We shot cows in the ass with BB guns. We threw snowballs at the milkman’s truck from Don Nelson’s rooftop. We bought copper tubing bean shooters at the hardware store every year for Devil’s Night, a secular holy day we faithfully honored.
My sainted mother Kathryn, or “Red” as my father called her, was a Canadian from Welland, Ontario. In 1960 she was helping me write 8th grade English compositions. She had gone to the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1930s. She was an English major on a journalism track but quit in her senior year during World War II to go to business school. She never learned to drive. After the five of us were grown, she got her first job in an insurance office in her early 50s and worked as a secretary until she was in her early 70s.
In the fall of 1960, while my mother was preparing to vote with enthusiasm for John F. Kennedy, my father Bill was preparing to vote with enthusiasm for Richard Nixon. A sarcastic, witty, likable World War II Navy vet who never had a bullet fired at him, my dad was a sports nut and politically incorrect long before the term was invented. At 40 he was a moderately successful stockbroker who worked downtown in Pittsburgh’s bustling Golden Triangle. His income peaked at about $14,000 a year in the mid-1960s – about $95,000 in current dollars. That was pretty good money when newspapers were a nickel and a pair of low-cut Converse All Stars for one of his boys cost $5.
Unfortunately, my dad never earned that much in a year again because the owner of his small firm got caught charging discounted commissions for stock trades. Until the brokerage industry was deregulated in 1975, commissions were fixed at a high rate by the industry itself and charging consumers anything less was against federal security laws. A sweet government-protected racket for the broker community, it was similar to federal regulations that in 1960 prohibited airlines from competing for customers by offering cheaper plane fares. When my dad lost his broker’s license and therefore his job, I got an early lesson in how existing businesses use government regulators to prevent competition, pad their profits and rob consumers.
In our universe of middle-class Germans, Italians and Irish, where diversity of any kind was noticeably absent, my dad stood out as an odd nonconformist. He was a well-read conservative Republican – the only open Republican I knew growing up. He loved Sinatra, Count Basie and Steve Allen and taught us all to revere Lester Young and Billie Holiday. He wore Bermuda shorts, played his jazz LPs full blast whenever he could and subscribed to an exotic conservative biweekly political magazine called National Review put out by his superhero William F. Buckley Jr.
My dad never went to Mass but he sent us to Catholic schools. He never drank beer or booze of any kind but smoked a pack a day of Camel straights. He was a scratch golfer and excellent baseball player. He had season tickets to the Pirates, Steelers and Pitt football. He had hard, black-or-white opinions about everything. He hated Elvis and loved Mort Sahl despite his liberal politics. He thought “I Love Lucy” and everything else on primetime TV except news, sports and Bill Buckley's “Firing Line” was so moronic he’d tell us we’d be better off staring at a blank wall. A Br
ooks Brothers man, he’d wear only button-down dress shirts, three-button suit coats, khakis, black socks and brown penny loafers or cordovans – and so did his four sons.
Our brains were shaped/distorted by my dad and humanized by my mother and aunt. Being a media junkie was his most important long-term influence on us. In 1960 he was bringing home three papers from work every day – the afternoon Pittsburgh Press, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where I would work 30 years later, arrived before dawn.
My dad subscribed to the Sporting News. We had the latest issues of Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, the Saturday Evening Post and U.S. News & World Report in the house at all times. Every night, as we ate together as a family, Douglas Edwards and 15 minutes of the CBS nightly news blared from the black-and-white TV in the other room. My father provided the criticism and running political commentary. It’s no surprise that every one of his kids ended up working in some kind of print or electronic media. In 1960 our house was noisy with his music, his radio stations, his newspapers and his opinions. It was also filled with hundreds of books. If there were any written by John Steinbeck, I didn’t know it.
First Impressions
Back home in Pittsburgh on my pit stop, I waited for Steinbeck to get to Chicago. I had retraced the New England leg of his trip in 10 days. That was almost exactly how long it took him. I saw part of the country that on average was whiter, less obese, more Democrat, richer and more likely to be employed than the rest of America was in the fall of 2010. I had already learned some generalities about America and Americans, at least the America and Americans along the Old Steinbeck Highway.
Speeding somewhere in Upstate New York I wrote in the notebook that was always on my knee that “America looks pretty good on U.S. 5, 2, 1 and 11. Richness and wealth predominate. People have tons of stuff – much of it for sale on the roadside. People take care of their houses – most of them. People cling to the water, like Steinbeck did, in their RVs, mobile homes, tiny cottages and mansions. … People drive safely and sanely. People don’t like to throw things away or tear down old houses or barns, no matter how slumped and sagging they are. People are inside their houses. People are friendly, clean and don’t seem to litter much.”
Those were my early drive-by impressions of the USA, but I could have written them at any time on my trip. What was true of the Eastern Time Zone would be true for the rest of the country. So far, I had driven virtually the exact highways Steinbeck did. But even with the help of dates and locations provided by his letters from the road, I often couldn’t sort out what he actually did from the account he gave us in "Charley." Much of his New England trip remained a mystery.
We know he drove fast and furiously. We know he never really camped on a farm in the White Mountains. We’ll never know if he really stayed at an over-sanitized motel, really entertained a family of Canuck potato pickers in Aroostook County or really had a run in with border guards in Niagara Falls. We have only his nonfiction book to rely on and it was unreliable, to say the least. The more I learned about Steinbeck’s journey, the more obvious it was becoming that nothing in it could be believed.
Steinbeck's Mystery Church
My sprint through changeless beautiful New England left me with a religious mystery – where was that “blindingly” white wood church Steinbeck said he attended in Vermont? In the book he describes getting dolled up and going to a church service on his last day in New England. He called it a "John Knox church" and enthused about the minister’s fire-and-brimstone, God-is-going-to-kick-your-ass sermon.
The scolding made Steinbeck feel bad and guilty inside, like a first-rate sinner whose sins were his own fault, not, as the “psychiatric priesthood” of the day would have it, “accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control.” He was so “revived in spirit” by this booster shot of God-fearing guilt, he said, that he put $5 in the plate ($35 in 2010 money) and shook hands with the minister warmly at the church door.
Until I woke up and smelled the fiction in "Travels With Charley,” I thought it’d be a breeze finding that white church. I even hoped to dig up the scary sermon Steinbeck heard. Because I was a 100-percent-pure product of a Catholic education, first grade through Villanova, I was taught little about Protestants except that I’d go to Hell if I attended their Sunday services or dated one. I assumed "John Knox" was Steinbeck's indirect way of saying it was a Presbyterian church. So before I ever set tire in New England, and long before I realized every other one of its 1.3 million lovely old churches was white and made of wood, I called Presbyterian presbyteries in Vermont and northern New York to ask if they could help. The good Presbyterians of New England tried like hell but failed me.
After my tour of New England, his mystery church remained a mystery. I still didn’t have any idea where it was – or if it ever was. That sly dog Steinbeck, I had come to realize, could have heard that sermon in a church anywhere and at anytime in his life. The only Sunday he could have attended a church service in Vermont was Oct. 2, 1960. But on that day he was already in Upstate New York motoring toward Niagara Falls and Chicago.
Initially, when I was being too soft on his fictionalizing, I wrote in my road blog that the “true” facts about the church didn’t matter because the scene reveals something important about his religious psyche. But that was a rookie literary detective’s mistake. What the scene actually reveals is how hard he was working to pad his nonfiction book.
There’s another religious issue. In “Charley” Steinbeck wrote, “All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher.” If he really attended church every Sunday – and there’s no evidence he did – he never wrote another word about it in “Travels With Charley” or in his letters. Was that statement about going to church each week another innocent bit of creative nonfiction or another white lie?
10 – Westward, Ho
In my quixotic travels with Charley about America I paused five times, in Chicago, in Seattle, in California and twice in Texas. Then I saw and felt beloved people who knew me as I knew them. It would be quite easy to recount every moment of these steps but it would be out of drawing with the rest. A book has to be one thing, just as a poem does – or a chair or a table.
– Cut from first draft of “Travels With Charley”
Steinbeck Timeline
Tuesday, Oct. 4 to Oct. 9, 1960 – Chicago
Steinbeck writes in the book that the morning after camping on private land by a lake along U.S. 20 in northern Ohio or southern Michigan he went fishing with the young man who had let him stay there. Steinbeck writes that at noon, “growing increasingly anxious” to meet his wife in Chicago, he climbs on the Indiana Toll Road and drives almost all night, arriving at the Ambassador East Hotel early the next morning. No one will ever know what he really did between Buffalo and Chicago or what he made up. He could have driven the entire 550 miles in one hellish day/night, or rented a motel room or, least likely of all, really camped by a private lake. Monday, Oct. 3, remains one of four mystery nights of his trip. In Chicago, Steinbeck’s wife jets out from New York. Together until Oct. 10, they stay at the Ambassador East Hotel and spend at least one night visiting Adlai Stevenson at his farm in nearby Libertyville, Ill.
Going to Chicago
I could tell the Ambassador East Hotel was in a really good city neighborhood because there was nowhere to park. Actually, there were plenty of parking spaces along the curbs of Chicago’s Gold Coast. But you had to be a constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago to figure out if you could park for five minutes without being towed to some foreign country.
I had left Pittsburgh 24 hours earlier, picking up Steinbeck’s trail on U.S. Highway 20 in Madison, Ohio. I originally intended to follow U.S. 20 through Cleveland, where it became Euclid Avenue. But the “fast wide” four-lane road that Steinbeck took through the city in 1960 was “fast wide” no more
. I wanted to ride through the heart of downtown Cleveland to witness the damage inflicted by 50 years of bad federal urban and social policy. But the suburban traffic quickly became too thick and annoying. Though it was nothing any American alive today hasn’t seen a thousand times, the malls and Target stores and Jeep dealerships on U.S. 20 would have appalled Steinbeck, whose sprawl early-warning system was famously sensitive.
When I pulled into a local Verizon Wireless store to get someone to unclog the email on my smart phone, I asked a businessman shopping for a new Blackberry if U.S. 20's traffic was just as hideous all the way through Cleveland. Worse, he said. Not only that, he added, they've got cameras at some red lights and U.S. 20/Euclid Avenue goes through "many atmospheric changes." Now that was a great euphemism for describing what I assumed was a sketchy black part of town.
Based on that unintentionally frank local scouting report, I decided I had more important things to do than waste two hours crawling though the sad/mean streets of a city rustier than Pittsburgh. I jumped back on I-90, aka the John Glenn Highway, and did an end run around poor battered Cleveland. When it was safe, I dropped south to U.S. 20 and went back to 1960 again. Large farms separated towns like Bellevue, Clyde and Fremont, which still had the highway as their main streets. Beyond Toledo, northwestern Ohio continued its spot-on impression of rural Indiana until it actually became rural Indiana.
Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 12