Back by popular demand. After the runaway success of my favourite Irish experiences retirement blog. Thanks Graham. I am following that retirement blog with another one in a similar vein. This time it’s about America back in the days when, in the words of Merle Haggard, a buck was still made of silver, coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be. Make of that what you will.
I admit that I seem to be spending more time looking back in these retirement blogs. Either a product of lockdown of more likely getting to a certain retirement age. Whatever. This blog is based on a series of memories stretching back to 1978, the first year of our teacher exchange. If you wanted to be pedantic about things, my experiences go back to the National Geographic magazines, as above.
I have a collection of from 1951 onwards editions that belonged to my father. Given he died in 1953 these would be the last things he subscribed to and, what you might call, his legacy to me. A legacy that’s seen me through pretty much the whole of my life. Funny what your parents bequeath to a child.
When I found these magazines in a trunk and started to read through them what I loved was not the exotic articles from South America, Africa, Asia, Polynesia and so on, but rather the adverts of all things American. Particularly the American cars, trains, TVs, music systems, cameras. But mostly the cars – Cadillac, Pontiac, Studebaker, Nash Rambler, Chevrolet and so on. This, I thought, is a place I’ve got to go to, never mind the dark continents as they were then known.
It took me until I was 30 years old to get there on the above exchange. We’ve been going back fairly regularly ever since. But not recently with your nut bag of a president. We don’t need to travel to have one of those, we have our own version.
But this retirement blog is about the good times, ‘back before’ as Merle said. My original plan was simply to let my mind wander back over the years, like you do when you’re 70 plus and make a note of 5 (to begin with) magic moments of our times spent there. I’m not going to include people, well I wasn’t. But now there will be one exception, at the end, for reasons that will become clear.
I started with 5 and I’ve just drawn the line at 20. A top twenty experiences not typically on the tourist trail, not in order of merit, they all have merit. I hadn’t planned (do I ever) to start with such a long introduction. I can tell, given I’m already up to 400 plus words, that I’m not going to squeeze my current 20 choices into one blog. But that’s OK. I’ll make a start. Just to say, before I do, that you’ll find the choices idiosyncratic and personal with just one or two of the obvious.
For example, I’m starting with my first American bar. There have been many others but this was my first love. It was in the town name of Rockville just outside Washington DC. I’m pretty sure, even at this early stage, that Cheers was on TV and I was a big fan. This place was so unlike my local back in Leeds. In an era in British pubs when you were lucky to get a packet of crisps and a pickled onion (and I hated pickled onions), this place served food.
By that I mean breaded shrimp and chilli dip. It helped that we weren’t far from Chesapeake Bay so seafood was ubiquitous (nice word). But a glass of American beer and shrimp, boy, I felt like I had arrived. And we had and we stayed a long time, even if we weren’t physically there, our minds, in some part, were. I couldn’t find any photographic evidence of it and it wasn’t the kind of place you took a photo of in those days.
I’m going to hop about. I will not be enslaved to the chronology of these memories. So I’ll jump to 2013 and our last visit to the USA. To New England, always a favourite area for us and one to which I will return later in this blog/s. In this case I’m going to choose second-hand bookshops. In an era when second-hand bookshops were on their way out in the UK, true to all that’s American, the ones we discovered on a trip around the New England states, were massive. I don’t think there is a more impractical souvenir than books but that didn’t stop me. I was collecting books that were unavailable in the UK about baseball. I still held the notion that my book, comparing cricket and baseball, might be finished. Now I doubt it but it didn’t take the pleasure away from these visits. For a book collector they were, as they say, hog heaven.
I’ll jump back in time now and make a big leap geographically. To New Mexico. We had friends who lived in Albuquerque (the second photo below is their adobe style house) and we all enjoyed the, about one hour, drive up to Santa Fe. Mrs Summerhouse has always been a big fan of Georgia o’ Keefe so the fact that her museum (first photo below, I think this was it) was located in this town was a bonus. We loved the town itself, quite unlike any American town we had been to. Ditto for the Mexican restaurants. There is, or was, a photography gallery there that was a place to drool over. You couldn’t of course they wouldn’t have liked your sputum on their floor. Magic place.
Another quite big hop and a definite change of climate. One of the attractions of America for me was snow (snow, snow, snow, snow, it won’t be long etc. which film did this song feature in?) A memory again. I’m going to cheat slightly by putting two experiences into this choice. I hope I can find photos of both. We don’t get a lot of snow in England with one or two exceptions, so snow events were things for us to treasure.
The first of the two was in Colorado. A place called the O-Bar-O near Durango. Mrs SH found this photo below we took after a night of heavy snow. The place still exists but looking at its on-line presence it has gone considerably up-market. Back in the 90s I think it was, it was just a collection of quite old log cabins. We sat in one having battled through the storm to town, to collect our pizza and wine, got back to the cabin, lit the log fire and watched the snow sinking past our window and covering the pines on the banks of the Florida River. It makes me shiver with pleasure just to think of it. This was next morning.
Jump back, however many years, to 1979. Two friends and Mrs SH and I and first child rented a cabin (we even have a photo of the actual cabin, it, much the same era I think), in West Virginia. Might not sound very remote but it certainly was and even more so after another night of solid snow. We were trapped, couldn’t get back to DC to teach. My friend and I were heart-broken. In fact I don’t think I have ever seen him so happy.
That’s four American life experiences in nearly 1,250 words. The next 16 are going to be featured in at least one more retirement blog, possibly two. You’ll just have to wait.
Two more West Virginia cabin photos I couldn’t bear to leave out. My legendary Transam (which will figure again) covered in snow. Not exactly 4 wheel drive. Did we really get 4 people in it and one small child? Surely not.
Good times in West Virginia.
Yes indeedy, until we had to go back to school