Have you found a way to cope with the big changes to your life style these past two years? Maybe life sent you through changes totally apart from our little viral COVID companion and the bug remains the least of your worries. To all of you going through those various big stages of living vastly different lives apart from COVID, I hope you’re finding shelter and relief from the storms. For the rest of us, possibly life is no worse/no better just a trifle weirder and very different from a yesterday in the late summer of 2019.
I find several things I truly miss from the 2019 and earlier world, but the ability to travel fairly unfettered and worry free winds its way to near the top of my list. Here in my rust bucket years I don’t travel all that much. Those glory days of plane/train/car adventures and city hopping over the continent reside as fabulous memories of my crazy youth and sanity challenged business self. I lived through 9/11/2001, which made for some huge changes in the way we traveled by air, but COVID just blew up the roads, rails, tarmacs, piers and every inn and hotel worldwide for the past two years. Now two years after the first virus onslaught, with many restrictions being lifted in the face of mounting economic challenges, travel remains very tenuous and treacherous for most people.
As a kid I traveled quite a deal with my parents on trips that were both for business reasons with my dad or just the family vacations with my mom where lengthy journeys in the car or by train were the norm. Those travels along with the summer weekend trips to Breckenridge ( see a few posts ago) and the family cabin to escape the heat of Bakersfield set the tone. The family business was the automobile.
My grandfather started the business in 1934 after being an executive at Bakersfield Garage for many years prior. He had moved to Bakersfield from Seattle by way of Oregon, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early 20th century. He settled in Bakersfield around 1912. He was a force of nature that my dad idolized. He departed the world after a brief illness a few days after my 10th birthday in 1961, family life forever changed. I’ve kept some photos and old keepsakes. As I’ve gotten older I’m not as sure that history matters as much as I thought for many years of my life, but the pictures do sharpen the memories even if they fog the eyes.
These are a few shots of Thrasher Motors from the late 1930s, postwar 1940s and mid-1950s. I can assure you there was nothing like riding in a new DeSoto speeding in the suicide lane along Highway 99 clocking 80mph in 1957 with my grandfather and family troupe heading to Disneyland for the first time from Bakersfield to Anaheim and the land of orange trees everywhere.
So, I’ve had a driving passion to get behind the wheel and go for most of my life. In the mid 1960s, as my dad worked to clear off the loans of sold cars from the Thrasher Motors books, several cars ended up in our driveway as repossessions which had to be sold. Those vehicles with manual transmissions were easy prey for me to roll down, pop the clutch and take off with my friends for joy rides over the town while my parents were working. Turns out, as I learned on some of our last rides together when I returned to Bakersfield back in 2003, this was pretty much what my dad had done off the Thrasher Motors lot at 26th & Chester during the Great Depression before he got his driver's license.
My sister, also, gets a nod as an acorn that fell close to the car tree, since she became a cross country truck driver for over 15 years after many pursuits in agriculture and then trying the farm thing that just never worked out. I ended up with Margi’s little AMC Gremlin when she went to school in New Zealand as an exchange student in 1974. My first couple of cars had been slant-six Chryslers, a Valiant and a Dart. And between the two of those cars I travelled thoroughly to Southern California and throughout Los Angeles and Orange County for concert trips and visits. Spent lots miles to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo where family and friends were living and a couple of trips to San Francisco to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins living in Corte Madera. The Gremlin got me through my final years in college at UC Berkeley where I received my degree and married the beautiful woman, Kathleen, I live with today.
We had a wild car trip in the Gremlin to meet her parents in a little town north of Chicago where they lived, Harvard, IL. We took Highway 58 to Highway 40 to Las Vegas and Highway 15 to Highway 80 to Chicago and the trip out took 4 days. Kathleen’s dad repainted the Gremlin and discovered the car had been a accident, which my sister and parents had no clue about. The key was a little racing stripe factory decal on one side and a slick replication with paint on the other side. My future dad-in-law being the expert car-body man checked some other indicators to show the fixes done and marveled at the lack of rust on a car 7 years on the roads. The trip back was on Highway 90 and through Idaho to meet my grandmother in Pocatello, ID. It was awesome summer and great road trip.
Various cars came and went over the years. I remember the first new car I owned was a little Mazda GLC my parents gifted Kath & I prior to the birth of our first son, Patrick. Great Little Car, which lasted many years. The folks also had given us their 1966 wide-track Pontiac Star Chief Executive in 1978, but sadly I was hit driving in Berkeley when a woman ran a stop sign on Cedar and the car was never the same. I sold it for a song a few years down the road to a fellow Tower employee, Phil, who needed some wheels badly.
In 1991 I bought the best car I’ve ever owned. It was a silver 1992 model Mazda 929. I put on close to a 160,000 highway miles in the 90s before selling it in 2000 for another really terrific vehicle, a Toyota Celica, which I owned until moving back to Sacramento in 2013. So many miles on I-5, I-80, The 101, Highway 99, Highway 41, Highway 46, Highway 50, Highway 92, Highway 198, Highway 395, Highway 58, Highway 37, The 10, The 40, Sepulveda Boulevard, The El Camino Real and on and on it has gone. The beauty about California is that in a couple of hours you can find yourself in a different world with a different climate and a complete change of scenery. I understand there are issues in the state and it is an expensive place to live with too many people for a lot of people to handle but…………..there is no greater place to live for me. I’m hopeful the road will open up this year and some trips to cool places here in the west await me and my ride.
Thanks for stopping by.
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