Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip

by richard ratay

Don’t Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Roadtrip has a very Wonder Years vibe from the jump. Reading it in 2021 means that when the book looks back fifty years to road trips of the 1970s, the gap feels immense. If it were to follow the Wonder Years formula—which premiered in 1988 and flashed back to 1968—a similar hark back would dig in to how September 11th, 2001 changed American travel for decades. 

That kind of hurts me right in the old bones.

Aside from forcing me to wrestle with my own mortality, this book is my cup of tea.

Structurally, it swings between light personal anecdote and researched didacticism. Tonally, it is like talking to my dad. The author is a total square, and speaks with the casual paternalism born of white, Midwestern, upper middle-class comfort. Take, for example, the position of language regarding airline deregulation:

With some basic parameters and policies for the aviation industry set, the job seemed done.

 Except, of course, it wasn’t. In fact, the government was just getting started. As bureaucracies tend to view such matters, if a few good rules are sufficient, then many more are even better. The aviation industry also became swept up in a wave of sentiment opposing free market competition in the 1930s.

I’m not sure whether the anecdotes or the history lessons taught me more, but Pull Over! was at its best when it blended the two. The personal stories of the Holiday Inn “Holidome” sound bizarre and delightful:

The Holidome captured the spirit of the seventies like nothing else. Everything about it was artificial, tacky, excessive, cheap, haphazardly laid out, and questionably constructed. And, really, that was its charm. The exotic trees and tropical plants were all fake. The oversized tiki figures and towering volcano water slide were fiberglass. The sky over your head was Plexiglass and the grass beneath your feet was plastic. The water was highly chlorinated, the temperature overregulated, and the edifice as a whole tastelessly decorated. It was, in short, a majestic synthetic marvel. And it was wonderful.

There is much more to uncover than simple memoirs of a childhood spent pining for that geodesic dome—the creation myth of the American chain motel was fascinating, too: “[Kemmons Wilson, founder of Holiday Inn] constructed new Holiday Inns along each highway at a distance of a full day’s drive from one location to the next.” A wildly analogue way to plot out construction sites, but with interstate highways being brand new I can’t think of a better way to greenlight locations to tempt sleepy drivers. 

This, but station wagons.

Samples of the author’s prodigious road-tripping experiences served as garrulous jumping-off points for facts and figures about the why-and-wherefores of everything from motels and national chain restaurants to car safety and the highway construction. Learning the genesis of the faux wood paneling on the station wagon was worth the price of admission. “Station wagons” used to be aftermarket modifications to add storage for both luggage and people. They were basically big wooden boxes stitched onto the back of a sawed-off Model T, carting their cargo around train stations. These real wooden vehicles eventually got co-opted by the car manufacturers, who dropped the pricey wood and slapped on artificial paneling. And voilà, the look of every surf rock band was minted by enterprising carpenters (car - penters?).

Even President Biden is a station wagon guy. In a speech from 3/31/21, he pulled out a reference to the highway systems that would make any baby boomer wistful: ‘In America, anything is possible.  Like what we did with vaccines a decade ago that laid the foundation for COVID-19 vaccines we have today.  Like we did when the Interstate Highway System that transformed the way we traveled, lived, worked, and developed. Americans could visit relatives anywhere in the country with just a family station wagon.” That’s a pretty impressive shout-out to a car that, as Pull Over! puts it, lives on mostly as a memory:

While a handful of scrappy distant cousins of the great station wagons of the seventies remain today, these vehicles as a species have all but vanished from our roads. But for those of us who spent countless hours of our childhoods queasily staring the wrong way down the highway, station wagons will be remembered for far more than fake wood paneling. They’ll be remembered as the vehicles that led us on many genuinely fun adventures.

Being able to recognize that a subtle call went out to the most reliable voting bloc—those that remember when America was the land of limitless highway adventures—is not something I would have recognized before this book. “Station Wagon” elicits no Proustian madeleine memory hole for me, but the book did send me tumbling into my own long-forgotten past in one other way. While discussing the “word’s largest” type of roadside attraction, something caught my eye. “...[W]hile a lumber store in Binghamton, New York, boasted of building the World’s Largest Ladderback Chair…”. Yes, Pa’s Woodshed can in fact be seen off the highway, and the weirdly-specific technicality of not being the “World’s Largest Chair,” but the “World’s Largest Ladderback Chair” is very Binghamton. This is a local oddity that I have spotted from the highway hundreds, if not thousands, of times. In fact, it is the subject of my very own youthful anecdote, pulled from the annals of Dinaburg history that still draws a laugh at every family reunion. For you see, the world’s Largest Ladderback Chair was the punchline of the very first joke I ever created:

“Knock Knock.”

“Who’s There?”

“Pear?”

“Pear Who?”

“Pear big chair!”

Perhaps it is pair and not pear, though who can truly say, as this is the first time the joke has made the leap from oral to written permanence. The meaning, as well as homophony, is well and truly lost to the vicissitudes of time. It’s a big chair. Or, at least, it was. Asking friends and family to send me a photo of the landmark chair has led me to discover it burned down eight years ago, in what was classified as arson. Nothing but intrigue at “The World’s Largest Pile of Ashes from a Ladderback Chair!”

I don’t know if anyone ever came to Binghamton, New York solely for the pear big chair, but, well, if Pull Over! taught me anything, it’s that people have driven farther to see less.