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

  Before I went to sleep, I walked two blocks to Central Avenue, which, fortuitously, was old Route 66’s route through the city. It bustled by day. But at 9 most of the restaurants had closed and little squads of homeless persons were patrolling the sidewalks. Lucking into the Asian Noodle Bar, I ate a good cheap late-night meal at the counter with one other customer and several waiters.

  Central Ave had lucked it through the 20th century urban renewal craze largely unchanged and unscathed. It still had lots of old store fronts, slashes of neon and architectural treasures like the Pueblo Deco-style KiMo Theater, which was scheduled to be demolished but was saved at the last minute and renovated instead.

  In the morning I had no interest in "awakening my senses" at the Hyatt with a $12 zucchini and cheese frittata. That breakfast delight and $9.50 worth of seasonal fruits and berries, said the card by my czar-size bed, could be delivered right to my 12th floor room, plus tip. I’d have passed on the cheese frittata if I was Donald Trump’s adopted son. Instead, I decided to descend to earth and seek a bagel and coffee in the wide quiet streets of downtown Albuquerque. I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn't have to pay a toll on the elevator.

  It was Nov. 2 – Election Day. The historic date the Tea Party was going to seize America from the Democrats and give it back to the Republicans, the party that had taken us to a foolish war in Iraq, copiloted the economy into a mountainside and squandered federal money it didn’t have like drunken Democrats.

  Another French Connection

  When I left the Hyatt Regency I walked into the first likely storefront I saw – La Quiche Parisienne Bistro. I swear, I didn't notice the French name. To me it looked just like another downtown coffee & bagel shop. But Bruno, the proprietor/baker behind the counter, said there were no bagels for sale – just French pastries and his quiche du jour.

  By the time I was finished eating my tasty quiche Lorraine, Bruno knew I was from Pittsburgh and I knew his wife used to live in Pittsburgh. He went in back to get Sabine Pasco. Not only had Sabine run a French bakery in downtown Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, she used to live only two townships away from me.

  Unfortunately, things didn't work out too well for Sabine business-wise in Pittsburgh. It was a town of too many Italian bakeries and few French people. She went bankrupt and moved on to other cities. She was yet another brave/crazy entrepreneurial businesswoman. But she and Bruno were holding their own in “a so-so location,” which was haunted by day and ruled by night by a permanent clan of homeless street people.

  Sabine and Bruno were the last members of the French race I met on my trip. For some strange reason I had met more French-based people than any other ethnic minority. In 43 days on the Steinbeck Highway, I met exactly 59. I met two French-Canadian vacationers in Maine, a Polish biker from France in Oregon, two French bakers in Albuquerque and 52 French tourists in the Mojave Desert. Plus there was Sonia the French-Canadian Tour Guide and the French Canadian customs officer at Niagara Falls who let me in her country without a passport. Every one of them was so nice I decided to forgive the French nation for its rudeness, cultural chauvinism and Nazi and socialist sympathies. I also decided they were right all along – Jerry Lewis was a genius. As far as I knew, there were not a lot of French people in my next destination, Texas.

  I took what used to be Route 66 out of Albuquerque and reentered the desert. I was sorry I didn’t have time to visit my sister Mary, as I had originally planned. Mary lived only about 100 miles straight north of Albuquerque, in the mountains not far from Los Alamos. She became a hippie in the 1960s and pretty much stayed one for the rest of her life. The mother of three daughters, she was a pioneering home-birther and a home-schooler.

  With one exception, she was so far off the grid she’d have to be arrested by helicopter. She lived a few miles from the highway at 9,500 feet in a tiny A-frame house made with hay bales. She had a few horses and llamas, but no electricity, no phone, no car, no road. Her water came from a nearby well and she subsisted on a diet of tortillas and beans. Her backyard was a national forest and in winter she needed snowshoes to get to town.

  As my brother John once told a Pittsburgh newspaper writer, Mary lived like “it was 1840.” That was still true except for two fairly recent additions – a Honda generator and a solar-powered satellite dish for her computer. Mary supported her hermitic, $3,000-a-year lifestyle by making and selling beautiful felt dolls and hats.

  At 59, she was perhaps the happiest, most serene, most self-reliant mountain woman who ever grew up in a suburb in the 1960s, wore Villager skirts and went to a Catholic girls high school. It would have been cool to see Mary’s new hay house, but I was not interested in any two-day side trips. From Albuquerque I could see the finish line.

  19 – The Greater State of Texas

  I know no place where hospitality is practiced so fervently as in Texas.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Sunday, Nov. 20 to Nov. 29-30, 1960 – Texas

  Steinbeck says in “Charley” he spent “three days of namelessness at a beautiful motor hotel” in the middle of Amarillo while the broken front window of his camper shell was repaired. He says Charley was sick and was left with a kind vet for four days. Elaine rejoined him in her home state of Texas and the pair went to her ex-brother-in-law’s cattle ranch in nearby Clarendon, arriving the day before Thanksgiving. Steinbeck doesn’t say in the book how long he stays at the ranch and never mentions that afterwards the Steinbecks went 400 miles south to Austin to visit Elaine’s sister until the end of the month.

  Amarillo and the Good Vet

  After passing up a dozen cheap, wildly illuminated 1950s motels in Tucumcari, I crossed into Texas on I-40 and pulled in to a mercifully unlighted picnic area where no one in his right mind would have a picnic. A dozen tractor-trailers were parked nose-to-tail. I drove well past them to the edge of a wide empty parking lot and went to sleep quickly.

  When I awoke at 5:20 a sliver of moon was slowly climbing over the lights of Vega, Texas. Overnight some unkind trucker in a big rig had parked three feet behind me. His diesel engine was idling noisily. Pulling down the rest of my blackout curtains, all I could see were the sides of monster trucks, all idling noisily/chokingly. I was penned in. I jumped out into the chilly darkness, stepped into my Keens and barely made my escape. It was my closest brush with death on my whole trip, which proves how safe the highways of America are.

  By 6:08 or 7:08, depending on whether I wanted to believe my cell phone or my car radio, the eastern horizon was starting to glow. James Carville was crying on CNN News. Overnight America supposedly underwent a historic political change. Republican Tea Partiers had seized the U.S. House and a new Golden Age of limited government, lower taxes and personal freedom was allegedly on the way. It was the usual hype and hysteria. Nothing would be changing on the U.S.S. Big Government except a few deck chairs.

  What pleased me most was that Rand Paul, the son of ex-Pittsburgher and libertarian Texas Congressman Ron Paul, was the new U.S. Senator for Kentucky. And poor California. Its people were so desperate. After almost three decades, they had put former Gov. Moonbeam, aka Jerry Brown, back in power. He was going to try to salvage the sorry state he helped wreck 30 years earlier, this time without the help of Linda Ronstadt.

  Amarillo – the biggest city of the Dust Bowl with 50,000 citizens in the 1930s and 193,000 now – was rolling out of bed as I joined the morning rush hour. I ate at a Waffle House where the waitress’ accent was so strong I could barely understand anything but “Honey.” In Amarillo my task was to find what I mistakenly was calling “The Scott Ranch.” The ranch was owned by the family of Hollywood actor Zachary Scott, who was Elaine Steinbeck’s first husband.

  Elaine was from Austin. After she divorced Zachary Scott and married Steinbeck, she never burned her bridges to the Scott family, which had a lot of money, cattle and land, which are interchangeable currencies in Texas. Steinbeck’s son Thom worked at the
cattle ranch as a teenager in the summer of 1960. And Elaine and Steinbeck had been invited to a millionaires’ Thanksgiving “orgy,” as he calls it in the book.

  They apparently stayed at the ranch for about four days without Charley, who was recuperating from his urinary problems at a veterinarian clinic in Amarillo. Poor Charley. He was in and out of kennels and vet’s offices the whole trip. But it was a good thing he went along. He gave Steinbeck somebody to talk to and worry and joke about. And when the editors at Viking expunged his wife’s presence from the West Coast part of the original manuscript, Charley saved the day – and ultimately the book.

  Charley and his personal plumbing issues provided “Charley’s” only dramatic thread. He apparently had prostatitis and that chronic medical problem and his bathroom habits were a supposedly humorous running gag in the book. Maybe there was another clever metaphor going on – someday I plan to ask the Steinbeck scholars if Charley’s peeing all over America had a double meaning I missed.

  If what Steinbeck wrote is to be believed, he took Charley to two veterinarians during the trip. He took a very sick Charley to an uncaring and incompetent Bad Vet in Spokane and to a young and gentle Good Vet in Amarillo. The Spokane vet was a boozy bum. But Steinbeck says in the book that Charley stayed with the good Texas veterinarian for four days and was brought back to health. I meant to try to find that tender animal doctor with “the trained and knowing” hands when I went through Amarillo. But I got so involved in my search for the cattle ranch I completely forgot about the poor dog.

  After I got home to Pittsburgh I made a few phone calls back to Amarillo, looking for the oldest living vet in town. Hoping the Good Vet was still alive, I talked to several veterinarian offices in Amarillo to see if I could learn anything. My best hope was Dr. Fred Love. He was 74 and had been practicing for 50 years. He’d treated a lot of animals passing through town – including movie stars’ pets and circus animals. His name was too perfect to be believed, but Dr. Love was not the Good Vet that Steinbeck took Charley to in 1960.

  Dr. Love, along with another old-timer, Dr. Johnny Wise, could not think of any vets of that era who were still alive. Neither could a veteran vet at Dr. Wolf’s office. Vets Love, Wise and Wolf? Amarillo’s animals were in friendly hands. The vets concurred that there were no old stories in the local veterinarian community about fixing Steinbeck’s poodle’s plumbing problems. So did the Good Vet of Amarillo really exist? Maybe. But I suspect that like the Bad Vet of Spokane he was just one more character Steinbeck whipped up, or enhanced, to add a little drama to his thin tale.

  In Search of Steinbeck’s Ranch

  From my corner office at the Waffle House, I called cattle ranch brokers and real estate offices in Amarillo. I called the University of Texas in Austin, where Zachary Scott’s papers were stored. I left messages with heirs of Zachary Scott. No one could help me locate the ranch, which I hoped to visit and document with photographs.

  I tried all the private-sector angles. I even walked into a real estate office where 12 agents were having a meeting and asked if anyone had heard of “The Scott Ranch.” Every single Texan I talked to did their state’s friendly reputation proud, but no luck. Someone suggested I call the office of the Potter County Clerks of Courts, which I reluctantly did. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with bureaucrats or go deed surfing in a strange county. But by the time I got downtown the good ladies who obviously run Potter County government were already doing the hard work on my behalf.

  While one lady was informing me that 640 acres equaled a section and 13 sections was “a small cattle ranch in these parts,” another pointed me to a gigantic old framed map of the Amarillo area on which the names of hundreds of property owners were handwritten. (In Texas, even the Panhandle is big.) The map weighed about 150 pounds and was jammed behind some file cabinets. I squeezed in and eyeballed the map for about 10 minutes. Way at the top edge I found a little square of land with “S.L. Scott” written on it. The land Sallie L. Scott deeded to actor Zachary T. Scott Jr. in 1941 was about 47 miles north, just across the border into Moore County.

  Off I went, braving the crosswind and murderous sun. I sailed across an arid, gently rolling short-grass prairie that had more cattle than trees or Republicans – and I couldn’t see any cattle. No wonder you had to own 30,000 acres in Texas to make it worth owning land. The only humans I saw along U.S. 87 were a couple of kids hot-rodding a jeep down the middle of the so-called Canadian River. Near Masterson I turned off U.S. 87 by a garage/office building and drove in on the asphalt road like I owned the place.

  After a mile or two I was on a hard dirt road. I passed a few small oil wells and some drilling equipment. A dozen head of Black Angus posed handsomely against the tan grass and blue sky. A couple miles of sandy dirt and low bushes later, I came to a hilltop. I could see for miles in every direction and there was nothing to see.

  Seven miles from U.S. 87, I came upon a group of buildings with a few big cottonwoods and two pickup trucks. The centerpiece of the compound was a solid one-story white cedar and stone farmhouse. In one of the outbuildings a pack of unseen dogs barked furiously.

  I knocked and knocked on the front door. No one was home on the range. The hot wind brushed quietly across the barely green grassland. When the wind paused, the flies appeared. Given Texas’ reputation for guns, I didn’t dare peek into the house. I took my photos and split. I went into the town of Dumas to the Moore County Clerk of Courts office to look for some historical information about the property. Though they tried, the friendly women there couldn’t help me any further.

  On my way back to Amarillo, I was feeling pretty smart. Once again I had stumbled on to what I was looking for by finding the right people, asking questions and following my nose until I hit something or got shot at. I had discovered Steinbeck’s fancy Thanksgiving cattle ranch. Or so I thought.

  I drove through downtown Amarillo at evening rush hour and headed south. My plan was to follow, as best as I could, the route Steinbeck and Elaine probably took to Austin, where they visited with her sister until the end of November 1960. My cell phone rang at 70 mph. It was Professor Susan Shillinglaw, the Steinbeck scholar from San Jose State. She was calling to say she was sorry she would be out of town the coming weekend. Huh? I was 1,300 miles east of her and headed in the opposite direction.

  It took me a while to realize what was going on. Shillinglaw hadn’t found my “Travels Without Charley” business card under her office door until five days after I left it there. She taught classes Tuesday through Thursday. It was Wednesday. Great. My card had been sitting on her office floor in San Jose the whole time I was in Monterey, which somebody at the university had told me was where she lived but wasn't. She actually lived in Los Gatos, 60 miles north of Monterey, so I would have missed her anyway .

  It was total confusion, another bungled attempt to have a formal interview with the elusive “Queen of Steinbeck Studies,” as I had taken to call her. Shillinglaw knew more about Steinbeck and his life and works than I could learn in another lifetime. I always figured she’d be my literary expert. She’d be the scholar to tell me whether it really mattered if Steinbeck fictionalized and fibbed his way around the USA.

  But I felt like I was back in high school trying to get her to go to the prom with me. She was always busy, hard to get and rudely or dizzily slow in getting back to me. For months I had been persistent without being pushy. But most of my phone calls and emails to her had gone unanswered or unreturned.

  The first time I met her, during my spring research tour of the West Coast, I knocked on her office door on the campus of San Jose State. There was no answer. It turned out she was sleeping in her office. Now there’s an unforced metaphor for a book about Steinbeck scholars failing to notice the problems in “Travels With Charley” for 50 years. When she woke up we spoke briefly in her office but she had to leave to teach a class.

  It was always something. In August I gently stalked her at the Steinbeck Festival, telling her I wante
d to formally interview her when she had time. But she always had something pressing to do during the festival and I was never aggressive enough. Now I had missed Shillinglaw again. I had wanted to tell her what I had learned about Steinbeck’s actual trip. Stuff even she didn’t know. As with Jay Parini at Middlebury College in Vermont, I wanted to get her reaction to my discoveries for the record. It wasn’t meant to happen.

  After proudly telling Shillinglaw I’d just found Steinbeck’s Thanksgiving cattle ranch, I told her I’d call her after I got back to Pittsburgh. We never spoke again. I called and left messages. We exchanged a few short emails over the next two months. Her student evaluations said she was nice but disorganized, both of which rang true. But she clearly had no interest in talking to me about what I had learned.

  That night I slept soundly at one of Lubbock's five Wal-Marts. Texas must have 200 of them, which was one more reason to like the well run, fiscally sound state. Steinbeck liked and appreciated Texas, its people and culture. He said it was a state of mind, a mystique bordering on a religion, and he was probably right. After only one full day in Texas, I had decided Texans were my favorite kind of American. Every one I met had been friendly, helpful and warm. I couldn’t have found “the Scott Ranch” without the help of a handful of beautiful Texas gals who worked in the county clerks office of Potter County.