[Travel]. [Automobiles]. Hubbard, John M

U.S. Circumference Tour. July 10 -- August 20, 1948. Traveled by John M. Hubbard and Brad Randall Jr. [caption title]

[New York?]: 1948. 23pp. of typescript on rectos only. Minor wear, inner margins punched with two holes for storage in an album or folder. Very good. Item #4877

"The purpose of this Tour around the United States was to fulfill a suppressed desire to see our country while we were still young and free." So begins this original typescript of a 1948 trip around the country by two young Connecticut men, John M. Hubbard and Brad Randall, Jr. in a 1938 Plymouth sedan with 97,130 miles "on the speedometer to start with." The text was written by Hubbard, who often references Brad within the narrative. The trip took the two young men from New York City to Florida and then across the Southwest to California, then eastward again, over the course of just over a month in the Summer of 1948. The men mostly camped out in hammocks set up near their car. On their first day, they attempted to make it to Cape Charles, Maryland, though they fell twenty miles short, instead spending the night in a trailer park near "a squalid negro section with tumbled down houses." Their trip continues down the eastern seaboard, partly by ferry, to North Carolina. They spend a few days swimming, fishing, and staying with Brad's family in Fort Myers, Florida before turning westward.

Along their way westward through the "southland" of Tallahassee, Mobile, and New Orleans, they encountered "a colored porter" at a motor lodge, passed by "an occasional plantation framed in giant oaks covered with spanish moss," described the area between Mobile and New Orleans as "the Riviera of the U.S.," and more. Next, they visited various Texas locales on the Gulf Coast including Beaumont, Houston, and Galveston, where they spent time golfing at River Oaks Country Club and took dates to Galveston's Turf Athletic Club, "a very swanky gambling club [that] the Texas Rangers have been trying to raid for months." They then continued west through Texas, visiting San Antonio, Marfa, and El Paso on their way to Tucson and Yuma, Arizona.

The two men reached El Centro, California on July 31. They spent almost two weeks in California, visiting San Diego, Coronado Island, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkley, Sacramento, and Lake Tahoe (while passing through many other named cities along the way). Hubbard often provides wonderful descriptions of their various stops, as well as interesting observations on locals, landscapes, wildlife, their meals and experiences at country clubs, their visits with friends, and more. They also mention at least twice their attendance at the movies, watching Key Largo in Houston, Foreign Affairs in San Diego, and an unspecified movie at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, "where the movies first make their appearance...and where the stars put there [sic] initials and hand and foot prints on the sidewalk." While in California they also attended car races, went fishing, saw the world's biggest bowling alley, and spent at least one day "job hunting."

By mid-August, Hubbard and Randall turn for home, visiting a few towns in Nevada (Carson City, Virginia City, and Reno) and Utah (Salt Lake City) before visiting the Continental Divide at Berthoud Pass, Colorado and proceeding thence to Denver. They then raced for home through Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York before Hubbard took a train to Hartford, Connecticut. His mother planned to meet him there for the final leg to his home in Pomfret, Connecticut.

1948 was a banner year for intrepid travelers heading out on the open highways of America -- the same year Jack Kerouac began work on his seminal Beat novel On the Road, which was based on his own adventures on the American open road between 1947 and 1950. The present travel account has echoes of the freedom of Beat literature in its descriptions. Hubbard also mentions that they visited a "war buddy of Brad's" in Columbus, Ohio; cross-country travel was a particular feature of the lives of war veterans in the late-1940s and 1950s, as returning soldiers sought to see the country they fought so hard to defend in Europe and the South Pacific. The present travel narrative is a brief, but albeit descriptive and interesting account of a cross-country jaunt by two well-to-do Connecticuters who saw a great deal of the United States in just over a month in 1948.

Price: $950.00