Calling all Geezers
I'm a geezer too just a yungin though. Watching a bit on the history channel about early roads and vehicles, in the US. I remember redding a long time back about the adventures of Eisenhower and an a...
Forum Discussion
I'm not a geezer so I don't have any memories of that long ago. Our first road trip was when we moved from Buffalo to Denver in 1963. The main thing I remember from that trip was that Kansas went on forever looking exactly the same. It must have been almost traumatic for me as I always try to avoid that state whenever possible.
More to the point of traveling way back when - there is a great documentary film by Ken Burns about a guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson who took a road trip in a 1903 Winton from San Fransisco to NYC. you can read about him here: Wikipedia and the video (Horatio's Drive) is available on Netflix and on Amazon.
This is from the description of the book also available on Amazon:
"In 1903 there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire nation and most people had never seen a “horseless buggy”—but that did not stop Horatio Nelson Jackson, a thirty-one-year-old Vermont doctor, who impulsively bet fifty dollars that he could drive his 20-horsepower automobile from San Francisco to New York City. Here—in Jackson’s own words and photographs—is a glorious account of that months-long, problem-beset, thrilling-to-the-rattled-bones trip with his mechanic, Sewall Crocker, and a bulldog named Bud. Jackson’s previously unpublished letters to his wife, brimming with optimism against all odds, describe in vivid detail every detour, every flat tire, every adventure good and bad. And his nearly one hundred photographs show a country still settled mainly in small towns, where life moved no faster than the horse-drawn carriage and where the arrival of Jackson’s open-air (roofless and windowless) Winton would cause delirious excitement."
And - thanks to all you geezers for the stories you've posted so far. Great reading!
More to the point of traveling way back when - there is a great documentary film by Ken Burns about a guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson who took a road trip in a 1903 Winton from San Fransisco to NYC. you can read about him here: Wikipedia and the video (Horatio's Drive) is available on Netflix and on Amazon.
This is from the description of the book also available on Amazon:
"In 1903 there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire nation and most people had never seen a “horseless buggy”—but that did not stop Horatio Nelson Jackson, a thirty-one-year-old Vermont doctor, who impulsively bet fifty dollars that he could drive his 20-horsepower automobile from San Francisco to New York City. Here—in Jackson’s own words and photographs—is a glorious account of that months-long, problem-beset, thrilling-to-the-rattled-bones trip with his mechanic, Sewall Crocker, and a bulldog named Bud. Jackson’s previously unpublished letters to his wife, brimming with optimism against all odds, describe in vivid detail every detour, every flat tire, every adventure good and bad. And his nearly one hundred photographs show a country still settled mainly in small towns, where life moved no faster than the horse-drawn carriage and where the arrival of Jackson’s open-air (roofless and windowless) Winton would cause delirious excitement."
And - thanks to all you geezers for the stories you've posted so far. Great reading!
