My October Tinkertown visit began with a nice chat with owner Carla Ward. We had exchanged a few emails when I reviewed her 2020 book, The Tinker of Tinkertown, so of course, that was a topic, and talking about that book naturally led to her mentioning that the Tinker of Tinkertown’s daughter had also written a book about her dad. Leaving Tinkertown was published about a month after what had been my most recent visit to the museum, so maybe I can be forgiven for not knowing about it. It took a while for the copy that went home with me in October to reach the top of my reading list, but once it did, it quickly made an impression. Tanya Ward Goodman has remarkable writing talent — and she’s not afraid to use it.

There is a lot of not being afraid, or more accurately, overcoming fear, in Leaving Tinkertown. Ross Ward, Tinkertown’s creator and Tanya’s father, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease at age 57. Everyone around him had plenty of fear to overcome.

Tanya was living in Los Angeles at the time but was present in New Mexico when the diagnosis was delivered, and even moved back to the museum that had been her childhood home for a while to help with things as the disease progressed. On the day of the diagnosis, she found herself remembering stories her dad told her as a child and wondering just how the plaques and tangles the doctor tried to describe would affect her father’s brain. She asks herself, “Will he survive this? If he doesn’t, who will tell the story?”

It seemed pretty obvious that it would be Tanya who told the story, and that sort of reinforced the idea that the book was about Ross Ward. I did certainly learn a lot about the incredibly creative artist from this book, but I soon realized that the book really was about its author. I suppose I should have known that from the title.

Tanya’s life wasn’t exactly typical. That her parents divorced and her dad remarried when she was quite young is hardly unusual, but that her mother and stepmother were both important influences as she grew up was a bit so. Even more unusual were occasional trips with her father as he traveled the country, painting rides and signs for carnivals and the like. The house she grew up in had walls made of concrete and empty bottles. It was filled, like a museum, with her dad’s artwork, and part of it was an actual museum open to the public.

Alzheimer’s is a main character in the book. When Ross is diagnosed with it, his mother insists on leaving South Dakota to be with her son in New Mexico. Before long, the disease had grabbed her too. It moves fast and is a sort of high-speed preview of what to expect with Ross. Tanya writes about the strain this places on everyone in the family with complete frankness and uncommon skill. This is what I had in mind when I spoke of her not being afraid to use her writing talent.

Of course, she must have overcome a considerable amount of fear in writing about other aspects of her life, such as the budding romance she put on hold in California to spend time in New Mexico. And overcoming fear and other emotions surely played a role in dealing with all those issues in real life, too.

I have some experience with Alzheimer’s. It is what took my dad. But he was in his 80s, not 50s, and was as far from rebellious as it is possible to be. Also, I was close to it for only a few months and not a few years. So, there are many problems Tanya and others had to deal with that I cannot relate to. But watching a guy that could once do anything turn into someone who can do nothing… Yeah, that’s tough.

Leaving Tinkertown is part of the Literature and Medicine Series from the University of New Mexico Press. Part of their stated mission is to showcase “the texture of the experience of illness,” which this book does incredibly well. It’s been out for more than a decade now, so I don’t think anyone would call it a spoiler if I let it be known that the budding romance bloomed and that Tanya is happily back in LA with a husband and a couple of kids.

Leaving Tinkertown, Tanya Ward Goodman, University of New Mexico Press (August 15, 2013), 6 x 9 inches, 232 pages, ISBN 978-0826353665
Available through Amazon.

Before I even opened this book I was aware of Gloria Nash’s childhood fascination with the 1964 World’s Fair, the family circumstances that brought her back to the neighborhood, and her visits to the old fairgrounds that ultimately led to creating Looking Back at the Future. I was not aware of a high school photography class assignment to “locate and photograph remnants of the fair” that had recently closed. A few black-and-white pictures taken at that time are included in this volume where she wraps up that assignment in style.

Of course, that’s not the only thing I was unaware of and learned here. One that seems like a biggy is that the 1939 and 1964 New York World’s Fairs were held at the same location and that the real goal was the creation of a park. The fairs were simply one of the means to that end. In terms of smaller details, the book’s ratio of new revelations to things I already knew is overwhelming. A short time ago, I knew essentially nothing about the 1939 fair, and about the only things I knew about the 1964 fair were that it was home to the iconic Unisphere and that the Ford Mustang was introduced there.

The book’s subtitle, “Photographing Vintage Leftovers of New York’s World’s Fairs”, accurately describes its main thrust. Well-written text provides background on both fairs, and there are descriptions of buildings and other items that no longer exist, but photographs of what that subtitle calls “leftovers” fill the bulk of the book. Most were taken by the author although a few come from other sources. Some images from postcards and other promotional materials are also used sparingly. The book is printed on good quality fairly heavy stock but it is not coated gloss stock. All of the modern photos are bright and clear and look quite good but this is not a “coffee table” book.

Nash has done a phenomenal job in tracking down fair remnants and makes sure that others can “locate and photograph” these leftovers, too. The location of all leftovers at the fair site (now Flushing Meadows Corona Park) is shown on a map with color coding to distinguish 1939 leftovers from 1964 leftovers. Both chapters on “On-Site Leftovers” contain what amounts to a tour guide for a walk that visits each of them. Chapters on “Off-Site Leftovers” describe locations and give addresses where appropriate. An appendix provides these locations in a list format.

Some of the leftovers from 1939 became leftovers only because they could not be shipped back to a Europe at war. Poland, which was invaded in September 1939, did not reopen its pavilion for the fair’s second season. Others could have made it home but did not. I was surprised to learn that four 25-foot-tall columns that were part of my home state’s building at the 1939 fair have survived and stand at the entrance of a cemetery in Cherry Hill, NJ.

It’s not surprising that more leftovers remain from 1964 than 1939 but it might be surprising that what is probably the oldest fair leftover is from the more recent fair. Jordan made a gift of a nearly 2000-year-old Roman column from the Temple of Artemis. It remains on site but was damaged by vandals in June of 2023. Nash includes a picture of the full column along with one of the damage and another with the damaged section removed for repair. At least a candidate for the second oldest leftover is a carousel made by combining parts of a 1903 and a 1908 carousel. Although it has been relocated, it remains in the park and operates seasonally.

Although both of these fairs made lasting impressions on the people who attended them. neither was a success from the organizers’ point of view. Organizers in 1939 hoped for 50 million visitors but got only 45 million. The target in 1964 was 70 million, but only 51 million showed up. I wasn’t around in 1939, and even though I was very much around in 1964 and well aware of the fair, I did not attend. I have only attended one world’s fair in my life, and that was in 1983 in Knoxville, TN. Nash says that was the last profitable world’s fair held in this country. Coincidence?

Looking Back at the Future: Photographing Vintage Leftovers of New York’s World’s Fairs, Gloria R Nash, N R G Press (November 30, 2024), 8 x 10 inches, 124 pages, ISBN 978-1940046006
Available through Amazon.

If you would like to learn more about this book directly from its author, give a listen to her visit on the December 22 episode of the Coffee With Jim podcast. I did.

I’ve been anticipating this book for a few years now. Henry was probably well into his research for the book when he gave a presentation at the 2017 Lincoln Highway Association conference on trekkers who had incorporated all or part of the highway in their travels. The Lincoln Highway and other trails aimed at automobiles appeared in the latter half of the golden age of trekking, which Trekking Across America focuses on. Henry identifies this as roughly 1890 to 1930. Merriam-Webster defines a trek as “an arduous journey” and during that period just about any long-distance journey that did not involve the railroad was unquestionably arduous. I ordered the book as soon as I became aware of its publication but my own non-arduous travels and the winter holidays kept me from reading and reviewing it until now.

There are a couple of motorcycle-powered treks among those that Henry documents as well as a few powered by beasts of burden that include a bull, some goats, and a team of sled dogs from Alaska. But the vast majority were powered by the trekkers themselves and typically by just walking. “Pedestrian mania” was an actual thing in the latter part of the nineteenth century with all sorts of walking competitions and exhibitions taking place and being reported on by newspapers and magazines.

A fellow named Edward Weston is credited with getting the walking craze started by walking from Boston to Washington to satisfy a bet made on the wrong guy (Stephen Douglas) in the 1860 presidential election. Apparently, Weston decided that he really liked walking and was quite good at it. He proceeded to set records and win awards into his seventies. In some circles, the rampant pedestrianism of the time was referred to as Westonianism.

Henry is a longtime postcard collector and tells how he first discovered trekking through a misfiled postcard of two boys attempting to skate from New York to San Francisco in 1910. Trekking and postcard collecting make a very good match for each other. Weston financed some of his travels by selling photos of himself, and most of those who came after did something similar. Some postcards are just about the only evidence of treks that did not get very far. Others are the entry to sources such as newspaper reports that flesh out the trek.

Postcards are also a rather natural way to provide a visual connection with a trek’s story. Henry divides these stories into five chapters based — not all that rigidly — on the reason for the trek. Following a chapter’s introduction are several segments featuring one or two specific treks with at least one related image. Postcards often provide those images. These two or three page standalone segments allow “Trekking Across America” to be read in small doses if desired.

Individual males were hardly the only ones undertaking these long arduous journeys. Buddies, siblings, newlyweds, whole families, and even a few lone women appear on these pages. Incidentally, little evidence is presented here that a trekking honeymoon will lead to marital bliss. The rules for some of the contests and challenges were also interesting. Virtually every trek involved some sort of time limit but rules about clothing, starting with little or no money, and working en route were also common. After the turn of the century, gimmicks such as the aforementioned skating or rolling a hoop might be involved. One fellow fiddled every step of the way as he walked from New York to Los Angeles and on to San Francisco.

Trekkers were certainly a diverse lot and even included some handicapped individuals such as a man with one leg, a man with one arm, and another with no arms. All three remind us of unpleasant facts about the past. The leg was lost by a four-year-old playing in a train yard. That possibly could happen today but it’s not very likely. The three arms were all lost in factory accidents. The worker who lost his left arm was nine. Both arms were lost by a worker just four years older, thirteen. The Child Labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act might have prevented both of those but it did not come along until 1938.

When I first opened Trekking Across America and scanned the table of contents, I noticed that the epilogue carried the title “When Highways Were Stages”. Although it seems really silly now, I connected that with the divisions or stages of a route followed by stagecoaches. On reaching the epilogue, it instantly became apparent that Henry was referring to Shakespearean stages and not Wells Fargo stages and it added a layer of insight for some aspects of the stories I had just read. The earliest trekkers, such as Edward Weston, were respected and celebrated. That changed when baseball overtook walking as the nation’s number-one spectator sport and suffered even more as the twentieth century overtook the nineteenth. Whereas most, if not all, of the prizes pursued by the first generation of professional pedestrians were legitimate, this became less and less the case. Evidence of this is in the frequent changes in prize amounts, completion deadlines, and other rules claimed by trekkers as they traveled.

But even as confidence in cover stories fell and the trekkers became sometimes viewed as freeloaders, they were still welcomed to towns along their routes, their postcards. were purchased, and their lectures attended. Because, Henry believes, they were a break from the routine and they were entertaining. In Trekking Across America, they still are.

Trekking Across America: An Up-Close Look at a Once-Popular Pastime, Lyell D. Henry Jr., University Of Iowa Press (October 30, 2024), 6 x 9 inches, 278 pages, ISBN 978-1609389796
Available through Amazon.

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.