'Don't Make Me Pull Over!' Review: Station Wagon Memories [View all]

[question everything]

For many sensible people, the idea of packing the family into a car and driving halfway across creation has all the appeal of a root canal without anesthetic. But for Richard Ratay, a Wisconsin advertising man, the family road trip is a source of nostalgia rather than trauma. His long-distance childhood adventures in his family’s giant land cruisers are at the center of “Don’t Make Me Pull Over!,” a breezy and warm-hearted “informal history” of the great American family road trip.

Baby boomers and Gen Xers will thrill to recall driving without seat belts (young Richard was fond of stargazing through the rear window from the shelf atop the back seats), listening to music from an eight-track player, eating at Howard Johnson’s, drawing with Magic Slate pads and navigating with paper maps. Although the Ratays eventually got a CB radio—anybody remember those?—readers will be astonished to learn that the family made it every year from the Upper Midwest to the Gulf Coast without benefit of smartphones or GPS, no doubt in much the same mysterious way as ancient Polynesian seafarers traversed the South Pacific.

Despite energy shortages and stagflation, road trips were a mainstay of family vacations in Mr. Ratay’s youth, spurred by the Interstate Highway System and the blossoming of a motoring middle class. “During the 1970s alone, Americans logged 14.4 trillion highway miles—enough to travel from Earth to Pluto and back 2,500 times,” he reports, adding: “My family alone was responsible for approximately 1 trillion.”

Why all the driving? Most people simply couldn’t afford commercial air travel, which was artificially expensive as a result of federal regulation. “As late as 1975,” Mr. Ratay notes, “four in five Americans had never traveled by plane.” The cost was especially prohibitive for the larger families more prevalent back then, and you’d probably need a car when you landed anyway.

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Take those internal-combustion dinosaurs with the faux-wood panels running along the sides. “The first station wagons were standard automobiles retrofitted with wagon bodies” for use around train stations, the author tells us, and in the 1930s and 1940s Detroit produced classy-looking wood-bodied vehicles for affluent customers who aspired to the landed gentry. After the war, steel-bodied station wagons caught on with the masses, but in a nod to the vehicle’s aristocratic origins, many still sported “wood-grain panel decals.”

(snip)

Mr. Ratay is a charming raconteur who always seems to know just when it’s time to get us all back into the car with his big, quintessentially middle-class family, which seems to be riding off into the sunset even as you read about it. Of the two adults and four kids, Mr. Ratay’s colorful father, a golf-obsessed salesman, is the book’s unrivaled star. His penny-pinching, his nerve-racking insistence that there’s still gas in the tank when the gauge shows “E,” and perhaps most of all his portable executive cocktail kit from Sears make him a memorable figure—and never mind the time he fell asleep at the wheel trying to save on a motel.

Sadly, if you miss this sort of Americana, the family road trip is no longer what it was. Seat belts prevent the kids from roaming freely or stretching out, and each passenger can now lose himself in a world of private entertainment instead of playing license-plate games with everyone else. Flying became so cheap that eventually even the elder Mr. Ratay springs for a vacation by air. And while the family enjoys the extra time that flying gains them in Washington, D.C., the author is sensitive to what has been lost. “We’d taken a trip but we’d made no journey,” he laments. “And somehow it felt as though we hadn’t earned the right to enjoy our final destination.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-make-me-pull-over-review-station-wagon-memories-1533855254 (paid subscription)