Many moons ago on Highway 101 just north of Greenfield there was an odometer check. This consisted of four signs, the first starting a few hundred yards shy of Hudson Road, marked Mile 0, Mile 1, Mile 2, Mile 3 and finally Mile 4. To check your auto’s odometer, you slowed to 60 miles per hour at Mile 0 and if your odometer was accurate, you were at each mile marker in exactly 60 seconds. A mile a minute. And with that calculation you could guestimate at what time you would arrive at a certain destination. That little mathematical certainty has stuck with me for years.
I can remember using the mile a minute application on our family trips to visit relatives out of state in a variety of vehicles over the years. The first long trip we took was in 1959 to Missoula, Mont., to visit my mother’s younger brother and family, we were in a Borgward Arabella station wagon. Yes, you read that correctly, a Borgward. My father was a car lover, albeit his tastes were always a bit different and he was not fond of American made cars, referring to them as “big, old Detroit irons,” we owned four foreign cars before the switch to domestic. To this day I have no idea where, or from whom, dad purchased a little-known German auto in the Salinas Valley, but if there was a weird foreign car for sale, he would find it.
I was just shy of my seventh year the summer we motored to Montana in the Borgward, but I do have one fleeting memory of our previous family vehicle, a Studebaker convertible. What I remember is sitting up on the body of the car, feet dangling above the rear seats, while looking at three bison, or buffalo, that grazed in a field across Central Avenue from the Kenner Ranch. And to remember those great wooly beasts in that field one must have both a good memory and over three score and ten years of living.
After the Borgward had run its course, we owned three consecutive Volkswagens, two Beetles and then a Bus. Both of my parents were from Iowa, dad was born in 1915 in Des Moines but as his mother was a school teacher and his father a carpenter, two always employable professions, he lived for a spell in smaller towns where relatives lived, Bonaparte, Keosauqua and Keokuk to name a few, until returning to the capital city in the late 1930s. My mother was born in 1921 a few miles outside the small town of Cainsville, Mo., but moved to Iowa while still a preschooler. She spent most of her years in Mount Ayr, the county seat of Ringgold County, where her mother and kinfolk were 60-plus years ago; and where, I suppose, a few still reside.
So, it was in a 1959 Beetle we ventured to Iowa in 1961. This was the first trip where I was old enough to put the mile a minute calculation to use, this mainly because 60 miles an hour was, on level ground, about the top speed for a Beetle of that vintage. Accuracy was easy in, say, Nevada where geological flatness made the 396 miles between Reno and West Wendover an easy six hour and thirty-six-minute calculation. (Note: I just looked online and today, with higher speed limits, the calculated driving time is only six minutes faster.) But when negotiating the high passes of such ranges as the Sierra Nevada or Rockies, where uphill and downhill grades could vary the speed from 50 to 70 miles per hour, the calculations were bound to be a bit less on the money, but still I could come close to where we would be by the end of the travel day, which were usually six to seven hours driving time.
In subsequent trips to the Midwest, we traveled once again in a Beetle, this one a 1962 model (the only difference than earlier models was the rear oval window was much larger), and later, in 1964, in a VW Bus. Before that decade was out, we crossed the states in a Ford Econoline Van and finally in 1969, in the summer before my senior year in high school, in a 1968 Dodge Monaco. This was the first vacation I had a driver’s license and could be behind the wheel over roads I had traveled before as navigator; I can still remember my mother’s concern when dad let me maintain 80 miles an hour on the Kansas Turnpike. And I could have gone faster, much faster. That was because on the day we traded the Ford van in for the Monaco, which was on order, we were given a 1964 Dodge Polara until the new car arrived. Before we left the car dealership, Dad stepped over to the service area and spoke with the head mechanic for a few minutes and then we left. What he had done, knowing those models were then used by the CHP, was to pay the mechanic to have the same manifold and carburetor installed in our car. I’m sure that was never revealed to the owner of the dealership. Anyhoo, the result was the car could, in the vernacular of the day, haul ass.
I have never gotten away from the mile a minute idea when driving, and I have driven many, many miles since my teen years. I still get a little satisfaction out of estimating at what time I will arrive at a destination, be it hours or minutes away, and come very close, if not spot on, with my calculation. Counting anticipated stops, I recently drove a couple hours and arrived within minutes of my destination. But mostly my driving days are over and I have yet conceded to making such calculations for how far I travel in one minute while pedaling about the town. It just ain’t the same.
Take care. Peace.
