I am more familiar with Stuckey’s signs than their products. As a kid, I probably didn’t even know the company existed since my family did not travel much. They were still going strong when I started doing some traveling on my own and I believe I bought gas at their stores a few times along with a pecan log roll or two but there was very little money in my travel budget for candy and none at all for rubber snakes. By the time my own fortunes had improved to the point that snacks were regularly permitted on road trips, Stuckey’s fortunes were headed in the other direction. The main reason that I am familiar with Stuckey’s signs is that I drove by a bunch of them. Many, maybe most, were for stores that were closed.

I first became aware of Stuckey’s rebirth when friends in Indiana became resellers of the company’s products. I made a point of stocking up on pecan goodness when a couple of road trips had me passing nearby. One of those trips was to a conference where Stephanie Stuckey was speaking and where I met her briefly. I have been looking forward to this book’s publication since then and thought I had a good idea of the story it would tell. It turns out that I had the basic outline down reasonably well but I was missing a ton of details and there were some genuine surprises. There was even a mystery of sorts.

The first part of the story is not particularly unique. An ambitious and creative man builds a very successful business through hard work and the help of friends and family. At the height of the company’s success, he sells it to collect his well-deserved rewards. Plopped into the world of faceless corporations, the company survives but becomes faceless itself. It is a fairly common tale that usually continues with more decline and eventual disappearance. That’s where this story becomes different. It’s where it becomes worth reading. UnStuck is a well-written telling of the uncommon story of a third-generation’s retrieval of the family business.

William S. Stuckey, Stephanie’s grandfather, founded the company in 1937 and sold it (actually merged with Pet Milk Co.) in 1964. It remained a significant presence on the American roadside into the 1970s but corporate shuffling led to the brand’s serious decline before the decade was over. William S. Stuckey, Jr., Stephanie’s father, stopped the downward slide when he repurchased the company in 1984. Stephanie took over in 2019. Those are the bullet points on a company timeline with lots of space in between. UnStuck fills in much of that space with an understandable focus on the post-2019 years.

Stephanie’s father had great success in politics and served five terms in the U.S. Congress. She had her own success in politics with fourteen years in the Georgia state legislature. When Stephanie’s dad brought the company back to the family, he said it was based 80% on emotion and 20% on finances. There is little need to break Stephanie’s reasons for buying the company down by percentage. It was almost certainly 100% emotion. She had wonderful memories of her grandfather and road trips that included stops at stores bearing the family name. I have little doubt that a sizable percentage of the emotion behind the purchase was pure nostalgia.

Stephanie’s grandfather was known within the family as Bigdaddy. Six boxes of Bigdaddy’s papers play a very big role in Unstuck‘s story. How the new CEO studied spreadsheets and packed aging inventory into Mystery Boxes to return the company to profitability is interesting but it was what she learned from those papers that would let her move beyond that. They gave her some insight into how Bigdaddy viewed Stuckey’s, the company, and how he attacked problems. She cites his “two lessons in resilience — surviving World War II and the bypassing of his stores.”

I and many other fans of old roads are conflicted about the interstate highways. We appreciate their ability to make travel faster and safer but regret the damage done to small businesses in the towns they bypassed. Stuckey’s was not exactly a small business at the time the interstates appeared but it did depend on traffic through those towns. Bigdaddy used the upheaval as an opportunity to redesign and relocate his stores and establish a partnership with Texaco that made those stores “a one-stop shop”. The papers in those boxes did not provide specific answers to any of the company’s problems but they did reveal and encourage a truly open-minded way of looking at them.

That open-mindedness may or may not have figured into a board meeting described in UnStuck where “brand identity” was discussed. Thinking that Stuckey’s is “all about pecan snacks and candies” might seem natural but some serious reflection said otherwise. Stephanie had been visiting many of the surviving Stuckey’s stores and licensees and sharing some of the details on social media as a form of free advertising. That generated some responses almost none of which were about snacks or candies. 99% of the stories people shared with her were about road trips that just happened to involve Stuckey’s in some way. Most of Stephanie’s own childhood memories of Stuckey’s came from road trips. People may know that Stuckey’s sells pecans but they identify the company with road trips! Despite my limited experience, I do too.

I mentioned a mystery of sorts. Maybe not everyone reads dedications but I usually do. At the very front of UnStuck, I read that it is dedicated to John King. I had no idea who John King was and eventually learned that when she started writing this book Stephanie Stuckey didn’t either. Among other things, John King appears with Bigdaddy in a photo featured in the Stuckey’s company’s 25th-anniversary newsletter. John King is Black. After considerable effort, Stephanie learned that her grandfather and John spent a lot of time together during the company’s early days but not much else. In particular, she found no evidence that he was ever rewarded for what appears to have been significant contributions. That was not an unusual situation in the South in the early twentieth century which is also something Stephanie addresses in the dedication. On the other hand, there are several references in the book to the fact that Stuckey’s was never segregated which was sometimes possible only because the stores were outside the official limits of sundown towns. It is something that many people remember about the chain to this day.

The prologue imagines William Sylvester Stuckey thinking to himself after a pecan stand customer calls him crazy, “But that’s what it’s going to take to make it.” Stephanie finds herself thinking the exact same thing when she considers that people might think her crazy for buying what she had recently referred to as a “dumpster fire of a business”. The book does talk about pecans somewhat. It explains that the name comes from pacane, an Algonquian word meaning “nut that’s hard to crack”. Guess it runs in the family.

UnStuck: Rebirth of an American Icon, Stephanie Stuckey, Matt Holt (April 2, 2024), 6.25 x 9.31 inches, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1637744789
Available through Amazon.

It’s a simple concept. Position yourself at the southernmost point in the continental United States then drive to the northernmost point in the U.S. accessible by road. The former is Key West, Florida. Deadhorse, Alaska, is the latter. The two are separated by a little over 4,000 miles as an extremely hardy all-weather crow might fly. Limited to traveling on the earth’s surface, Tom Cotter and Michael Alan Ross clocked 8,881 miles in making the connection. The difference is easily justified. Tom and Michael had more fun than any crow could even dream of.

Tom Cotter is best known as The Barn Find Hunter from the numerous books and videos he has produced about automotive treasures found in barns and the like. He is also a road-tripper whose adventures include a cross-country Model T drive documented in a book I reviewed here. Michael Alan Ross is a very successful automotive photographer whose work filled that Model T book. On that Model T drive, MAR, as he is commonly known, drove a chase vehicle. This time he and Cotter share the driving and space in the small camper they tow.

That camper was a new Basecamp 16X on loan from Airstream. The tow vehicle was a 2021 Bronco Outer Banks on loan from Ford. As Cotter tells it, he got the Bronco by telling Ford that Airstream had promised him a camper and he got the camper by telling Airstream that Ford had promised a Bronco.

Very early in the trip, the travelers broke one of the few guidelines they had established by jumping on I-75 while still in southern Florida. This is at odds with the “backroad USA” called out in the subtitle and Cotter readily admits that it is “cheating”. But it is understandable. With everything that lay ahead of them, there was a natural urge to leave the familiar behind and get on with the exotic. Before leaving Florida, they returned to the planned program by leaving the interstate for US 27.

They clipped a corner of Georgia, then crossed Alabama (with a stop in Muscle Shoals) before turning north in Louisiana to reach Tennessee. They entered Missouri via the bootheel and maintained a west-by-northwest course through that state and Kansas with appropriate adjustments to take in the big ball of twine in Cawker City. Then it was a little more directly north through Nebraska and the Dakotas with a Memorial Day pause at the Black Hills National Cemetery in South Dakota. There was a different sort of pause at the North Dakota line. Despite all of Cotter’s past travels, he had, at this point, visited just forty-nine states. North Dakota was number fifty.

North of Bismarck, Cotter and MAR picked up US 2 and headed west. That might not be the most direct route to Alaska but there were friends near Seattle and, as any good road-tripper knows, anything can be “on the way” if you look at it just right. Hitting Glacier National Park and the Going-to-the-Sun Road might have also been a factor in route selection but the scenic road was not yet open for the summer when they arrived. There was, of course, plenty of great scenery even without Going-to-the-Sun, and plenty of interesting people, too. 

Cotter and MAR both had friends in the Seattle area but swapping hellos was not the only reason for making that a target. The two travelers had planned for a month-long break in the middle of the trip to attend to their day jobs and visit family. The Bronco and Airstream would be left with friends while they flew home and back.

With the break out of the way, it was time to enter Canada and head for the beginning of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Cotter had a recent (but not quite current) edition of The Milepost with him. The Milepost is published annually and is close to indispensable for anyone traveling the Alaska Highway. That road is its primary focus and its initial reason for being but it now not only covers the Alaska Highway but just about every path for getting to and from it. That includes coming from Vancouver which is what Cotter and MAR were doing.

British Columbia and the Yukon Territory contain the bulk of the Alaska Highway with only the northernmost two hundred miles or so being in Alaska. Cotter reports that any pride associated with returning to the U.S. was short-lived and declares this “absolutely the worst roads” they had driven so far. The Alaska Highway officially ends at Delta Junction but Fairbanks is easily reached on what is sometimes seen as an extension, the Richardson Highway.

The Airstream was left with a cousin while Cotter and MAR tackled the final stretch to Deadhorse in the Bronco. Several aspects of this trip reminded me of my own 2016 drive to Alaska but perhaps none so much as the mention of “a mandatory pit stop at the Hilltop Restaurant north of Fairbanks”. Even though I did not drive north of Fairbanks on my own but used a commercial tour company to visit the Arctic Circle, we had breakfast at the Hilltop before hitting the Dalton Highway.

My visit to the Arctic Circle had been a one-day there-and-back affair. Cotter and Mar spent a night on the Dalton Highway in Wiseman and two nights at the end of the road in Deadhorse. Just reaching the end of the road would be enough for most people but Cotter went above and beyond by joining the Arctic Polar Bear Club with a dip in the 40°F Prudhoe Bay to bookend his dip in the “warmer than my morning shower” water at the start of the trip in Key West.

Looking back over what I’ve written, it seems I’ve been reviewing the trip rather than the book. Maybe there is at least a sense of it in the included thumbnail images. It has lots of MAR’s wonderful photos. The thumbnails offer hints of these although they don’t show that they are printed on heavyweight glossy paper which helps them look their best. Cotter’s words augment the photos (or vice versa) with details of the trip I have more or less summarized. Those words are at their best when telling about encounters with others. Some are people living along the route while others just happen to be traveling a piece of it at the same instant Cotter and MAR pass by. The ratio of the two sort of reverses itself as the trip progresses. Residents — some permanent and some temporary  — outnumber people actually in motion during the early portions of the trip but the situation is pretty much the opposite once the Dalton Highway is reached.

Some percentage of interesting people exists among both residents and travelers just about everywhere. Cotter manages to find them on a regular basis but he suggests that the percentage may increase toward the end of the trip. “Boring people generally don’t travel to Alaska’s outback,” he observes. I guess that means his job got easier the farther they traveled.

America’s Greatest Road Trip!: Key West to Deadhorse: 9000 Miles Across Backroad USA, Tom Cotter and Michael Alan Ross, Motorbooks (September 19, 2023), 9.45 x 10.71 inches, 192 pages, ISBN 978-0760381069
Available through Amazon.

Twice I have posted previews of books. This was the subject of the first one back in 2013. The second came along in 2015, and I believe it was posted with the hope of boosting a Kickstarter campaign to publish the previewed book. I’m not quite sure why the first preview was posted. Maybe I just felt an overwhelming urge to write something. It does happen. Whatever the reason, I was obviously quite impressed with the This American Life episode where I first learned of Andrew Forsthoefel and his recently completed walk, and I really expected the book to appear shortly. It did not.

In a paragraph at the end of the second book preview, I reported that I was still following Forsthoefel’s blog and there was still hope for the book but that my confidence was weakening. I eventually stopped following the blog and missed the book’s publication a couple of years later. A recent Amazon Associates change (They dropped support for links to images.) had me revisiting all of my reviews and making changes to many. That Walking to Listen preview required no changes but looking it over jogged some memories and I learned that the book had been published — about seven years ago — and was now available.

The recently completed walk that caught my interest back in 2013 was 4,000 miles long and had taken nearly a year. The book documents the journey in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways which means it is much more about people and experiences than places. Of course traveling by vehicle, as Steinbeck and Heat-Moon did, is a lot different than walking, which Forsthoefel did. There is a third book I often thought about while reading Walking to Listen. Ten Million Steps on Route 6 is the story of Joe Hurley’s walk across America. That’s closer to Forsthoefel’s experience but Hurley had a chase car that picked him up at the end of each day while Forsthoefel often slept right where he stopped walking in a tent he carried.

“WALKING TO LISTEN” was written on a small sign that Forsthoefel carried. It was a visual aid when explaining what he was doing. I suspect it gave more of a sense of mission to his walk than simply speaking the words would have. Maybe it made people less reluctant to speak into the small recorder that Forsthoefel used in interviews. Being twenty-three and fresh out of college probably helped too. The bulk of Walking to Listen consists of Forsthoefel telling his story in his own words although he does use some quotes from interviews in the telling. But every chapter is preceded by a verbatim transcript of a portion of one of those interviews. The person or persons speaking is identified along with the location and approximate date and the transcript follows. Some are very short excerpts. None are longer than a couple of pages but they do add a little “live-action” to the well-crafted retellings that fill most of the pages.

The “fresh out of college” situation I mentioned is one of the reasons for the walk. Graduation is sometimes seen as a time to access things before making the next commitment and so it was for Forsthoefel. He frequently referred to life after college as “coming of age”. He really was walking to listen and hoped to hear some advice. But there was another source of uncertainty in his life. His parents’ divorce had surprised him and left him unsure of his relationship with his father. He started the walk hoping to get some help with that too.

Although Forsthoefel wanted mostly to learn something about himself, he couldn’t help but learn something about the world just as the other three writers I’ve mentioned did. Sadly, one of the biggest things he learned in 2012 was the same thing Steinbeck learned in 1962: racism in the U.S. is quite healthy. It is usually more subtle and there might even be a little less but it did not go away during the intervening half century. Forsthoefel happened to be in Selma, Alabama, on Martin Luther King Day. One of the people he spent time with was the city’s African American police chief. Clearly, progress had been made since March of 1965. Yet, on his last morning in town, he runs into a man he had met earlier. There are others with him and at one point he whispers to Forsthoefel, “But some of them are still living in the past, if you know what I mean. So don’t bring up integration. Just play it cool.”

Forsthoefel also learned that generosity, too, is quite healthy. People of all sorts offered help that ranged from a single donut to housing and feeding him for several days. He was grateful for every helping hand, of course, while realizing that some of that help would not have been there had he been anything other than a young white non-threatening male.

The walk can be considered a success I think. Forsthoefel probably didn’t get as much advice on “coming of age” as he hoped but he did get quite a bit and the confidence that comes from walking solo across the country no doubt helped a lot. The relationship with his father also seemed to be in pretty decent shape when the walk ended. At least one person reviewing the book thought too much space was given to these personal issues. I thought they were discussed just enough to provide some understanding of why the walk was happening.

I did not read this book to help with my own coming of age or with parental issues. It’s a little late for both. I read it to get another person’s view of the country and I got that — at three miles an hour.

Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time, Andrew Forsthoefel, Bloomsbury Publishing (2017), 5.5 x 8.15 inches, 400 pages, ISBN 978-1632867018
Available through Amazon.

100th Book Review
Responding to that Amazon change I mentioned involved filtering the list of blog entries and learning I had written 98 book reviews. One more has been published since which makes this the 100th book review published on Denny G’s Road Trips Blog.

For the second time ever, I’m reviewing a book that was a recent “#1 New York Times Best Seller”. That’s two more than I anticipated when I started doing reviews on this blog. This one, like the other one (The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles), will be pretty shallow. There are plenty of reviews out there from high-profile professionals and an author with two Pulitzers to his credit does not really need a lot of praise from me. McCullough’s forte was (he died Aug 7, 2022) biographies (his Pulitzer winners were Truman and John Adams), and The Pioneers tells the story of the white man’s take over of Ohio through streamlined biographies of the men who led it. They are not household names like Truman or Adams. A few, such as Putnam and Cutler, might be household names in select Ohio households, but most would be recognized only by fairly serious students of regional history. The book is not organized around individual biographies. The tale of early Northwest Territory settlement is told chronologically with the lives of key figures smoothly embedded and expanded forward or backward or both without much interference with the flow of time.

The Pioneers was recommended to me by multiple sources both in print and in person. The personal recommendations were made by people familiar with my interest in “local” history. The book is centered on Marietta, the first settlement in the territory. Despite it being on the far side of Ohio from where I live, it is a place I have visited many times. I recognized the names Putnam and Cutler and a few others but I knew just the basics about any of them. Instead of writing what I’ve already noted is unneeded praise, I’m just going to identify a few of the things this book taught me about my own extended neighborhood. 

I knew that Marietta had been named after Queen Marie Antoinette but I did not know why. From McCullough, I learned that the Revolutionary War veterans who named the town felt that she was more influential than anyone in getting France to support the revolutionaries.

In 1800, a square-rigged brig sailed from Marietta down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Less than a dozen years later, in 1811, the first steamboat on the river traveled from Pittsburgh to New  Orleans, with a stop in Marietta, in an astonishing fourteen days.

Even though the ordinance establishing the Northwest Territory seemed to rule it out, there was a proposal during the writing of the Ohio Constitution to permit slavery up to 35 years of age for males and 25 years of age for females. It failed by one vote.

There are many more, of course, and I believe that almost everything in The Pioneers is true. I had to slip that “almost” in there because I did discover one goof in the book. McCullough correctly writes that the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was killed in October 1813 by forces commanded by William Henry Harrison. He incorrectly states that this occurred “in Ohio’s northwestern corner”. The correct location is Ontario, Canada, at the Battle of the Thames.

I certainly don’t want to end this on a negative tone so I guess I’ll offer some praise after all. Anyone claiming to know anything at all about Cincinnati history should be able to tell how Mount Ida was changed to Mount Adams to honor John Quincy Adams following his trip to the city to dedicate the observatory there. McCullough tells of that trip and of Adams’ stop in Marietta during his return to Washington. A few residents of Marietta, including Ephraim Cutler, accompanied the former president from there to Pittsburgh. McCullough’s reporting provides a warm and personal view of Adams that I quite appreciated.

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough, Simon & Schuster (May 5, 2020), 6 x 9.25 inches, 452 pages, ISBN 978-1501168703
Available through Amazon.

The year Kevin Patrick spent “connecting with White’s Woods” may have been, as a blurb on the back of Near Woods says “In the spirit of Walden” but the resulting products are not the same. Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond was an experiment in self-sufficiency and the book he wrote some years later documented its success. His observations of nature and seasons were generally used to support some aspect of his minimalist lifestyle and not to educate the reader. I suppose some of Patrick’s observations are also made to reinforce some philosophical viewpoint, but he is a lot more subtle and he helps the reader share the raw observation as near as possible. Exactly one-half of this book’s pages are filled with some excellent photographs.

The word “spirit” also appears early in the book’s text. There Patrick says it is written in the spirit of other nature books and mentions, in addition to Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, Cousteau, and others. I believe what he means is the sharing of observations as accurately as possible and in a manner that promotes a real appreciation of what is being observed.

I’m not all that familiar with many of the authors named but did find myself making some comparisons with an author and book Patrick does not mention. In PrairieErth, William Least Heat Moon makes a deep dive into a single county in Kansas. In some sense, Patrick’s deep dive into the 250-acre White’s Woods is closer to Moon’s product than to Thoreau’s but that comparison is also far from perfect. By trying to look at that county from every possible angle, PrairieErth can sometimes seem like a writing class exercise. Near Woods looks at its subject from a lot of angles but not, I think, every angle. Just the interesting ones.

Of course, Near Woods is better looking than either Walden or PrairieErth. To some degree, that’s just something that color photographs do for a book. But these high-quality and well-chosen photos do more than make the book pretty. They are the “raw observations” mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. The book’s design incorporates the photos wonderfully and helps make reading the book a pleasure. Every lefthand page contains one or more photographs. Righthand pages are all text. Captions are in the extra wide inner margins of the text pages. It didn’t take me terribly long to recognize the beauty of this. Every page turn resulted in a new image that could be studied as quickly or slowly as desired before tackling a new page of text.

Sometimes there is a direct connection between text and photo and sometimes the connection is loose or non-existent. At one point a loose connection led me to believe that Kevin had cheated me or at least made a major goof. One of the more interesting finds in White’s Woods is a quad-trunk tulip tree. I really wanted to see this oddity as I read about it but the pictures next to the text were of something else entirely. A photo of the tulip tree in winter appears a page or two later and I realized that this is the image on the book’s back cover. The front cover shows this extraordinary tree in summer. I wasn’t cheated and the goof was all mine. Doh!

Photographs show the woods through one year of its life and the four seasons are used to organize the book. The woods’ history and possible future are mixed into the reporting of seasonal changes to provide some very pleasant lessons in natural and human history, horticulture, geography, and geology.

Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest, Kevin Patrick, Stackpole Books (May 1, 2023), 8.5 x 11 inches, 258 pages, ISBN 978-0811772211
Available through Amazon.