Too soon? What had been my most recent travelogue, A Canadian Connection, was published less than three months ago and I tend to agree with anyone thinking these paperbacks are appearing just a little too close together. But the facts are that neither the timing nor the sequence of these books was exactly arbitrary. Before I had finished writing 50 @ 70, I knew I had to produce a book covering the Canadian portion of that drive to and from Alaska, and before I had finished driving from Winnipeg to New Orleans last spring, I knew I had to produce a book covering that full-length drive of the Jefferson Highway. Then, in a manner similar to the scheduling of many road trips, I started working backward. It seemed reasonable to target release of the Jefferson Highway book ahead of the 2019 JHA conference. If there was any appetite for the book at all, it would likely peak about the time of the conference. That meant publication by early April (i.e., now). It also seemed desirable to have the tale of the Canadian portion of the Alaska trip follow the U.S. portion of the trip in 50 @ 70 without another book in between. So the sequence and overall timing was set and has come to pass. For the present, the travelogue job jar is empty.
All five existing Trip Mouse books tell stories of road trips. They are not guidebooks even though photographs and descriptions of points of interest are plentiful. All five share a common format, but the latest resembles the first a bit more closely than the others. A Decade Driving the Dixie Highway describes the many trips required to cover all of the network of roads that comprised the Dixie Highway system. Similarly, 50 @ 70 tells of multiple trips that passed through the last sixteen of fifty states. Even A Canadian Connection, which deals with a single journey, consists of northbound and southbound segments with a gap (Alaska) in between. Only By Mopar to the Golden Gate (which could have been called Lincoln Highway All the Way) and Jefferson Highway All the Way tell of a single end-to-end drive of a single historic named auto trail.
Jefferson Highway All the Way tells a little of the history of the original Jefferson Highway Association and the route it defined. It also touches on the formation of the modern JHA in 2011. But the bulk of the book concerns the events and sights (There are about 140 photos.) of that 2018 drive.
Jefferson Highway All the Way, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2019, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 154 pages, ISBN 978-1796535280.
Signed copies available through eBay. Unsigned copies available through Amazon.
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The Outer Banks and the Wright Brothers’ first flight are firmly joined in my mind. Although I’ve no problem remembering the year (1903), the month and date weren’t as easily recalled. I quickly looked it up the instant I first started thinking of the Outer Banks as a target for this year’s Christmas Escape and was very happy to learn it was December 17; Barely a week before Christmas Day, four days before the Winter Soltice, and five days before a full moon.
In 1968, it took a full seven games to determine a MLB World Series champion. The seventh game, which saw the Tigers top the Cardinals, was played on October 10.
Anthony Wayne gave Fort Greene Ville and Fort Recovery their names. They were significant in both his life and mine although the level of significance is severely tilted toward Wayne. Fort Recovery is where the army led by Arthur St. Clair was nearly annihilated in 1791. It got its name when soldiers under Wayne’s command built a small fort there in 1793. Also built in 1793, Fort Greene Ville stood twenty some miles to the south and was Wayne’s home base during the Northwest Indian War. The treaty ending that war was signed there in 1795. The town that developed on the site of the abandoned fort adopted the shortened name Greenville. I grew up near the midpoint between Greenville and Fort Recovery and adopted Anthony Wayne as a hero at a very early age. I eventually figured out that much of the initial attraction was due the the cool bicorne hat he was commonly shown in, but the fact remains that I’ve known of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne nearly all of my life.
It was probably about sixty-five years ago that I was hooked by that super groovy hat and decided that the dude under it was my hero. It was only a few years later that I saw a painting of a hat-less Wayne and was shocked to learn it was the same person. That painting might even be the same one that appears on the cover of this book. It was at least similar. I recognized that there was more to a man than his hat and Wayne survived as a childhood hero. Inside Unlikely General, Mary Stockwell reveals a lot more than a high forehead. Anthony Wayne was not, as some have interpreted his nickname, insane, but he was a long way from perfect. Perhaps the fact that I’m much older now explains why I was less shocked at learning of the imperfections than I had been at my first sight of Wayne bare-headed.
