The history of the great American family road trip
Jul 24, 2018, 6:06 PM | Updated: Oct 11, 2024, 9:39 am
Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash
‘Tis the season for the Great American Family Road Trip, which evokes visions of wood-paneled station wagons, whiny “are we there yets,” and stops at the world’s largest ball of twine.
Richard Ratay, author of the new book, “Don’t Make Me Pull Over! The informal history of the family road trip,” says the golden age of road trips was from the 1950s to the 1970s, but Americans are getting back behind the wheel again.
“The percentage of Americans who are road tripping now is really going up,” Ratay said. “I think I saw, in 2016, 39 percent of all vacations taken by Americans were considered road trips. That was up 16 percent over the previous year. In 2015 it was only 23 percent. So, obviously, road trips are getting to be popular again.”
Ratay said family road trips became popular after World War II after soldiers came home from the war. They started families and, with a booming economy, they had money to spend and paid time off.
“Air travel, at that time, was prohibitively expensive,” Ratay said. “On average, you would pay anywhere from two to eight times as much what we would pay today for the same air ticket. And of course, this was a period when American factories were churning out more and better cars than ever before because they had refined all their production techniques during the war. Of course, it was the same car factories who were producing warplanes and tanks and Jeeps in mass. ”
He says millennials are warming to the family road trip because of the control it brings. Unlike a flight, you can come and go as you please and stop whenever you want. But technology has changed the vibe of the modern road trip.
“In the backseats of our cars today, where families once played games like the license plate game and the alphabet game, my family used to love playing Mad Libs together, now everybody has these devices,” Ratay said. “We put a pair of headphones over our ears and drift off into our own personal movie or we’re on social media. We’ve gotten away from that idea of the family road trip as a shared experience. I hope that’s one of the few things we do rediscover along with the practical benefits of road travel.”
The father of two boys, ages 12 and 14, Ratay tries to strike a balance between family time and electronics. He stays stopping frequently along the way makes for a less whiny road trip.
He explains the last one he took with his family:
“We rented an RV and made that traditional American trek out to Mount Rushmore. Along the way, we stopped at the Field of Dreams, where, of course, the famous movie was filmed. A few hours further to the west, we stopped off in Clear Lake, Iowa, which is where the Surf Ballroom is. That was the last venue where Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper played before boarding an airplane and, of course, crashing into a nearby cornfield. We did make those stops at the Corn Palace and Wall Drug. Also, one of the most fascinating places for me was the Minuteman Missile Museum in South Dakota.”
Roadside attractions like these started to pop up in the 1950s as more people took to the highway and entrepreneurs looked to make a buck off bored families looking for any form of entertainment.
“The most interesting thing to me is how young America’s interstate highway system really is. We didn’t start building the interstates until 1956. Really, it took us two and a half decades to build them. Just a short list of the things that have been around longer than America’s interstate system include things like color TV and barcodes. David Hasselhoff, The Hoff, has been around longer than America’s interstate highway system.”
Ratay’s book is full of fun, historical facts, like why station wagons were wood paneled and the history of the drive-thru window. Pick up a copy.
Tune in tomorrow for the second part of my American road trip series to hear about the new, luxe American road trip that is completely planned for you. Prices start at $10,000!
