Books Every 20th Century Motor Camper Should Read!

This winter has been a tease. Occasionally it has gotten warm and sunny enough to be outside, but usually on a weekday. As soon as the excitement starts flowing in anticipation of Spring, Winter has been quick to close her frozen fist around my desires for the open road. C'est la vie! Often I've opened the garage doors and found the poor old cars unwilling to cooperate with my completely unreasonable suggestions of driving in the snow, though I have gotten out a few times and they have yet to forgive me for it.

On the less cold and dreary side of things, this provides ample time for READING! The wonderful thing about re-creating the early 20th Century, is the plethora of research material available. Photographs of everyday life are abundant and many are available online in free archives. It's wonderfully easy to "get it right". However, as I've often said, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it doesn't say all of them! Cue the book! Family sport camping as created thanks to the automobile may actually be America's first family hobby. As such, many books were written on the subject during that period. Imagine having the opportunity to read a book about what to wear, what to take, how to use it, and where to go, all written in the actual time-period you're looking to recreate? Guess what? It actually exists!

This "holy grail" of a book is called "Motor Camping" and it was written in 1923 by John C. Long and John D. Long. So you might think that this incredible magic tome would be pretty rare and expensive, right? Wrong! It is available for free online in a variety of formats right here! There is no excuse to not do your research. It's free and easy! This book is an absolute must-read for anyone who is interested in recreating the early 20th Century world of sporting and pleasure camping, even if you don't have a period automobile. There is a wealth of information here. (And if you REALLY need an original print copy, they range from $75-$100 on average)

The one thing that Long and Long don't give their readers is anecdotal experiences. Occasionally they'll illustrate a point with a little side story, but there are a lot of experiences and hardships that early sportsmen and women had to overcome that are not described here. Fortunately, there are many other books for that!

I will start with what I consider to be the best of the personal memoirs of motor camping. It is a gutsy story of a once in a lifetime opportunity for a young lady to travel across the USA in a Model T Ford with her best friend and her friend's husband as companions. The adventure is told from the young lady's perspective in a series of letters home. They camp every night and see wonderful sights, and have a wide array of adventures. She often describes herself sitting in her tent at dawn, writing about the previous days' events, so the memoir is as fresh as can be, unlike other accounts where the story was re-told much later after the participants returned. This book is pure and unadulterated. The book was published in 2003 by William Purser and Fred Noegel, Jr who edited the collection of letters and newspaper clippings into the book "The Auto Gypsies". Once you get past the introduction chapters that give a little background history and set up the story, the rest is the original letters as they were written in 1923. It is a delightful read and certainly holds the attention, as Miss Pansy Deese was an excellent and prolific letter-writer! This book is available as an e-book and on Kindle.

Next on my list would be "Motor Camping on Western Trails" by Melville F Ferguson. In this yarn, Ferguson recites the adventure of taking his entire family, including his in-laws, camping in two vehicles for a YEAR! They travel all over, meet lots of wonderful people, and see the last of the great "Old West". Eventually they end up in Hawaii, making them the farthest western motoring adventurers of their time. The book was published in 1925, but the adventure occurred in 1923. It would be interesting to know if they ran across the path of Miss Pansy Deese and the Noegels on their trip! Unfortunately, this book is out of print and copies are expensive, but your local library may be able to acquire a copy for you. This book is a delight to read!

Emily Post's 1915 Mercedes Simplex was a poor choice for the American road trip!

Equally enjoyable, but of a totally different nature, is Emily Post's (Yes, of Miss Manners fame) 1915 adventure, "By Motor To The Golden Gate". Ms. Post admits to making only one mistake, being that she took a 1915 Mercedes Simplex across the USA, which was not well-suited to the American roads, being overpowered, made with less common parts, and too low to clear the rough ruts in the unimproved wagon trails. She admits that they would have had much more fun in a flivver in spite of the social consequences. Ms. Post's adventure was less "roughing it" as they only camped one night in the desert when no hotels were available. Some parts are a little slow, as she is also reviewing the hotels she stays in along the way. However, one incident turns out to be an exceptionally exciting tale with as much action as you'd expect from any adventure novel! It is certainly a fun book. It is also available as an e-book and reprinted as well.

Next, we'll look at a book that is very close to home. Theodore Drieser's 1916 memoir of a road trip back to good 'ol Indiana, titled "A Hoosier Holiday" reads much like a tale of middle-aged men walking the line between trying to recapture their youth, and reminiscing about days long gone. They are fairly carefree and they flirt with female motorists, complain about young people, and talk about how the small towns have changed. One of the best things about this book is that they mention every single town they pass through, so it's easy to trace their route on any mapping app, which is kind of fun.

Now, if you read my blog post last month about 20th Century foodways, you'll know that when I give you a list of great stuff to try, I have to throw in one really bad one... I would like to nominate "It Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast" by Beatrice L. Massey for the prize of Worst Motor Camping Memoir. Their adventure "could have been worse", but their recounting of the trip couldn't possibly have been worse. I think a lot of this stems from the fact that, unlike many of their contemporaries, who were average, or middle class, these motorists are quite wealthy, and as such, I don't think they were prepared for the difficulties that come with this form of travel. As the title of the book suggests, the author focuses heavily on everything that she perceived as going wrong on the trip. Most of their misadventures were pretty trivial. At one point it rained on a day they had planned a big, swanky picnic, and they were afraid that their special shrimps and other treats would spoil, and so they picnicked in the hotel room, which disappointed the group. Other misadventures include poor hotel service, and utter disgust and dismay at the gaudy architecture of the homes in Chicago's wealthy suburban neighborhoods. It is a tome of complaints. It's worth reading, if you've already read everything else on this list and you're really, really bored, otherwise, save it for never.

There are many other good books out there to read. One that I would love to get my hands on, is "The Family Flivvers to Frisco" by Frederic Franklyn Van de Water. Like "Motor Camping on Western Trails", this book is out of print, but it tends to fetch a slightly higher price for a good copy. When I have time, I'll see if my library can borrow one for me. If you need more yet, I can highly recommend "Trails Begin Where Rails End" by Albert Manchester. Though this book was written in 1987, it is an excellent look at a variety of wonderful aspects of motor camping. The book is a little disjointed, as he starts out describing his own adventures in the late 1940's, then jumps around to the Indian Detours, an excursion service that, for a fee, would take you through Southwestern New Mexico in an automobile to see the sights and indigenous peoples, and then launches into a complete history of Pancho Villa's 1916 raid and the subsequent Punitive Expedition. It's an odd book, but fun to read and easy, as each chapter could be a short stand-alone story.

There are also many great fiction novels to read. Some pertain very little to motor camping, though reading fiction of the period gives excellent insight into how folks talked, thought, and lived. At times, it can be very fanciful, as this was an era of great change and a "sky's the limit" attitude. Anything was possible. This led to novels that we'd now consider to be science fiction, or even "Steampunk" in nature. One caveat though - While I have not seen this mentality much in the memoirs of actual events in the books listed above, most of the fiction of the period does have a slight racist bent and natural conservation is not a concept they often think about. Understand what you're getting into and don't be shocked. I think the Tom Swift novels may be one of the worst perpetrators of this. They are still fun to read, if you work around the junk. Books written by women tend to have less of these aspects. The "Motor Maids" series by Katherine Stokes is excellent and a lot of fun. It's written for young adults, particularly females, but even this middle-aged guy enjoyed them in spite of all the tears because the popular girl is mean... Many of these old novels are available for free, or in the case of Tom Swift, you can get 25 for .99 cents on Kindle. You can also find old copies or reprints just about anywhere, as millions of copies were sold before TV took over the entertainment world.

By Diliff - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42693401

Now, the weather forecast says I have at least another week to snuggle under a blanket with a cup of coffee and a good book, so I think I'll go do that while I daydream about warmer weather and my own adventures right around the corner! Happy reading, folks!