My mother was a little girl in the 1920s, and she loves to tell what it was like riding in their Velie or Maxwell automobile on the family’s frequent road trips.
Very few roads were paved in those days. Most of their travel was on two-lane dirt roads through the country. She and her brother liked to reach out the window and pull leaves off low-hanging branches as the car sped along at fifteen miles an hour. The trip to her grandmother’s house, which would take about three hours today, was a day-long journey back then.
If you got caught on a rainy day, the roads were a mess. They were mostly composed of yellow or red clay, and you were driving through pure mud. Many times, their car got stuck in this mud. When they did, my mother and the family’s collie got out of the car and stood on the side of the road. Her mother steered the car, and her older brother and father got behind and pushed.
Another problem with traveling on a rainy day was that there were no side windows in these old-time cars. They had front and back windshields and a roof, but no side windows above the doors. If it rained, they had shields that had to be put over the side windows. There was only one windshield wiper on the driver’s side, and the driver had to operate it manually while he was driving!
If the rain got too heavy, they simply had to pull over to the side of the road. And then, of course, they were likely to get stuck in the mud. Many people did not even venture out in a car if rain was predicted.
When her family had the Maxwell, her father always had to carry a spare axle, because it was common for it to break. Then they all had to get out of the car while he fixed it.
Flat tires were harder to deal with, too. Again they had to stop and get out of the car. Her father jacked the car up, and took off the tire. He had to remove the inner tube and place it in water to find the hole. He always carried a repair kit to patch the tire. After he had fixed the hole, he put the inner tube back inside the tire and secured the tire on the wheel. Finally, he had to pump it up with a hand pump.
On their trips to the country to visit relatives, there were no restrooms. When they needed to go to the bathroom, they had to find a hidden place in a nearby cornfield!
Since there were also no restaurants along the way, her mother always packed a nice picnic lunch for the trip. Around noon, they found a good place to stop. They would spread a blanket out on the ground and enjoy sandwiches, fruit, and pieces of homemade cake.
Of course it was all worth the trouble when they reached her grandmother’s house. They could look forward to playing in the country meadows with their cousins and sitting on the big wrap-around front porch in the evenings while the whole family visited.
