I forgot to mention the beautiful long-low-wide Oldsmobile four door sedan was without A/C. I don't think A/C existed in those days. If it was hot, you rolled down the windows. Daddy's left arm was always redder than the rest of him, because he propped it in the driver-side window and the sun cooked it. He didn't care. It was early summer, and we were going to California. He had crossed the deserts once. He knew it could be done.
We kids just sweated contentedly in the back bench seat. Hey! Wind on sweat cools you down. Who cares if it cuts down on your gas mileage for the windows to be open? That Olds probably got maybe seven miles to a gallon with it's powerful eight-cylinder engine anyway. And gas was pretty consistently 19.9 cents a gallon. Took probably three dollars to fill the tank. Of course, $3 was a lot more money in those days than today, but Daddy had calculated how much it would take to get to California, and then, he thought, he would go to work for the friend's mattress company, and we would be okay.
Meanwhile, we rather enjoyed the deserts. Highway 66 was not nearly as boring as the freeways are these days. There were all kinds of billboards and signs along the side, and other roads intersected the highway. The highway went right through small towns where you had to slow down and stop at red lights or stop signs. Out in the country, farms and trees and fields of corn or cattle were numerous. The farther west we traveled, the flatter and broader the land became, and trees became scarce.
It was my first view of deserts. I figured out that deserts are called deserts because they've been deserted by people, animals and plants; at least that's the way it looked from the window of the car. But the sudden rise of the mountains in the distance was so beautiful. The strange landscape formations that we came upon from time to time where a red clay column would stand like a slightly bent, pock-marked, lonely skyscraper in the middle of nowhere made our little eyes widen with delight.
We thought we were real modern, getting to sleep in motels and eating in cafe's. We envisioned camping along the road like the cowboys on TV, cooking our beans in a cast iron washpot over a twig fire. There were no big motel chains like Days Inn or Super 8, only small Mom and Pop motels, but we found them to be quite accommodating to big families. They had adjoining rooms with cribs and rollaway beds and couches in addition to the full size bed for Mama and Daddy (mind you, not queen- or king-size beds). Some of them even had TV where we could watch The Mousekateers or Howdy Doodie or Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, albeit in black and white with maybe a bit of "snow" on the screen.
We were always exhausted by the time we stopped at a motel at night. We usually had baths and went sound asleep quickly, and didn't worry about the lack of entertainment. Each of us (kids) had napped a little in the car on the way. The rest of the time we spent playing road games, like "I see something you don't see..." and by the time anyone guessed what it was, it was far behind us.
We loved the Burma Shave signs. For those who've never traveled 66 Highway, or some other old road that had those posted, they were commercials for Burma Shave (a shaving cream). There would be one sign that would display the first line of a poem, usually white letters on a red background. At 65 miles per hour, you could see the red sign from quite far away, and if you were a good reader, you could read the whole line before you passed it. Then you would watch carefully for the next sign, which followed shortly with the next line, and so on, four or five lines of a rhyming poem, that ended with the words "Burma Shave." Of course, I can't remember any of those poems now, but it sure was fun to read them along the 66 Highway out in the desert and plains of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Arizona... That's where we ran into a dust storm...
But that's another story...
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