By Tim Sanders

Before we begin, here’s an e-mail I received from master gardener and fellow journalist Carl Wayne Hardeman of Collierville, Tennessee. It concerns last week’s column on modern jargon:

Tim,
We Southerners seem to be a little behind on the modern talk. Back in the 60s I decided to become a hippie and go to San Francisco. Boy was I embarrassed when I got off the bus and was the only one with flour in my hair.

I told Marilyn "I wish I’d said that," and she replied "Don’t worry, you will."
Now to business. Summer is here, and that means only one thing–summer reruns. No, actually it also means it’s vacation time. The kids are out of school now–for nearly a month in some instances–and this gives Dad a chance to pack the family and a few necessities into the SUV and head for the nearest gas station to see if the clerk will accept a perfectly good lawn mower and perhaps one of the older children in exchange for a few gallons of regular unleaded. (A man in Billings, Montana recently traded his 2002 Ford Explorer for 24 gallons of gas, and then hired the new owner to drive him to Canada in his former vehicle.)

The modern Interstate system allows parents hours of carefree sightseeing in the front seat, while the children sit in back, softly humming Kum Bay-Yah. Okay, so I lied. The parents will inevitably be squabbling over whether Earl broke wind again or merely drove past another pulp mill, while hostilities will erupt sporadically in the back seat over which DVD the kids want to watch on the Panasonic flip-down overhead monitor.

When I was a kid, back in the ’50s, there was no fighting with siblings in the backseat over which DVD to watch. That was because a) I was an only child, and b) there were no DVDs, only BVDs, and nobody wanted to watch those.

Since we lived in Michigan, and since in those days the fervent hope of every Michigan resident over the age of forty was to someday escape the inclement Michigan winters and move to Florida, my Dad often took us on vacation trips to the Sunshine State. We would leave in wintertime, shortly after the first of the year, and by the middle of February had usually shoveled our way through drifted snow to the end of the block. Dad had bought a new Studebaker Champion in the early ’50s. With that little grey vehicle he pulled a Half-Moon house trailer, filled to overflowing with clothes, fishing gear, cameras, foodstuffs, several toolboxes, fans, electrical cords and two beagles–Bugsy and Queenie. He pulled that trailer back and forth from Michigan to Florida each year for most of the following decade. [In the mid-‘50s, some house-painter friends of Dad’s in Hallandale, Florida painted both his Studebaker and the Half-Moon trailer in surreal, matching, two-tone aqua and cream hues. From then on, we no longer looked like an impoverished family pulling a tiny travel trailer with a little grey car, but like an impoverished band of gypsies pulling a tiny circus wagon with a clownmobile.]

But where today’s children waste much of their traveling time watching foolish videos and playing mindless electronic games, in those days I appreciated our Florida trips. While Mom and Dad may have eased the tedium of the open road with Don MacNeil’s Breakfast Club and The Arthur Godfrey Show on the car radio, I spent my time absorbing travel information which would help further my education. Here are some of the ways this industrious, serious-minded child of the ‘50s spent his time while traveling:

1. History - Since our Florida vacations always occurred during the school year, I was obliged to keep up with my studies. When it came to history, I mostly studied Alley Oop. Yes, I carried other educational material with me, including my stack of Looney Tunes comics, but only Alley in the Sunday funnies could give me the historical data about time travel my fertile young mind craved. Alley Oop was the caveman Dr. Wonmug’s time machine had plucked from the prehistoric kingdom of Moo. Dr. Wonmug brought him to the 20th Century, and then sent him back in time to meet historical figures like Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Napolean, Pocahontas, King Arthur, and even a young Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. In addition to Dr. Wonmug, there was his assistant Oscar Boom, King Guz of Moo, Alley’s dinosaur Dinny, his friend Foozy, and of course Alley’s really hot girlfriend, Ooola (she deserved those three "o"s). It was all very educational.

2. Poetry - Those red Burma Shave signs by the side of the road were everywhere in the ’50s. Each sign contained a line of verse, followed by another sign with another line. Most drivers had to slow down to read them. In Dad’s case, since he was driving a six-cylinder Studebaker pulling a fully-loaded travel trailer, he had to speed up so we wouldn’t forget what the previous sign had said:
 

SAID FARMER BROWN ... WHO'S BALD ON TOP ... I WISH I COULD ... ROTATE THE CROP ... BURMA SHAVE

We were humor-impaired back then, so those little red signs cracked us up. I memorized several of them, and repeated them to my parents over and over again during each trip until they didn’t crack up anymore. They countered by either turning up the radio or threatening to make me ride in the house trailer with the dogs.
 

3. Science - I’d be hard-pressed to remember exactly which year it was, but on one trip (I believe we were somewhere in northern Florida) I discovered that you could actually burn a hole in a newspaper with sunlight and one of those little plastic magnifying glasses that came in boxes of Crackerjacks. I was bored with the scenery, and the combination of that magnifying glass, the late morning sun blazing through the car window, and the bald spot on the back of Dad’s head all led to a fascinating scientific experiment. To his credit, Dad kept the car and the trailer right side up when he lurched off the road. Mom had been asleep, and when she asked him "Lloyd, what’s wrong?" he said he believed he may have just suffered a stroke. Eventually my magnifying glass was confiscated as a safety precaution.

So even if your budget won’t cover automotive DVD players, iPods, or other electronic gadgetry, a little ingenuity on your kids’ part may still turn an otherwise humdrum vacation into a valuable learning experience. And when you’ve experienced all the learning you can stand, you might just want to duct tape the kids to their seats until you reach your destination. It worked for Dad.