Photo: Richard Halliburton
In the 1920s and 1930s, Memphian Richard Halliburton rivaled Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart as a household name with a following that filled $500-a-ticket auditoriums to hear him lecture. Like a cross between Indiana Jones and Lowell Thomas, he was an adventurer and travel correspondent with a childlike sense of wonder and a grownup flair for publicity. He wrote like a boy seeing a giraffe for the first time, a columnist for The Commercial Appeal once wrote. It wasn't art, but it turned Halliburton into a best-selling author.
His parents had big career plans when they sent Richard Halliburton off to his freshman year at Princeton, but he rebelled, craving the kind of adventure that would be involved in seeing the world on a shoestring, or so he informed his readers, largely pre-teen boys. It was seventy-some years ago that I thrilled to his tales—the Taj Mahal by moonlight was only one of many—and acquired my first touch of go-fever from his then famous book, The Royal Road to Romance (Garden City Publisher, 1925).
In my senior year in high school my roommate Dave Stevens and I started saving food for a voyage we secretly planned but the small pile of oranges, the only reasonable non-perishable things we could carry from the dining hall, looked totally inadequate. The dream faded. I had thought seriously of three possible careers, as a minister, as a writer, or as a scientist, and when I graduated with honors in math and science, engineering won out.
Early in my freshman year at RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy, New York I chanced to read in Esquire Magazine an article called “Handbook for Bums.” The author was seeing the United States largely as an itinerant farmer. Now you must know that the publisher chose a title quite insulting to the world of hoboes, for we generally agreed that we as “hoboes” would work, or at least offer to work, for our handouts, while “bums” were worthless beggars. Anyway, once again the go-fever bug bit, and I was overwhelmed. I packed a small suitcase, let it out my second-floor bedroom window on a rope, and started out on a February evening with $4.50 in my pocket.
West across the Hudson River, on through Schenectady, a short ride, and another and then after midnight traffic stopped, snow began and was soon wind-driven, and I walked—and walked—and froze. Spent a half hour in the hoped-for shelter of a big billboard, but it stood high off the ground with an open wooden latticework beneath, which only speeded the wind in many little jets. Keeping moving was better, so I tramped with stinging snow or sleet finding its way into my parka until, with the first gray light, a truck full of scrap iron gave me a lift into Cobleskill. I helped the trucker unload the scrap, and they bought me breakfast and gave me a silver half-dollar besides. In retrospect it occurs to me that the scrap was destined to be sold to one of the nations later called the “axis,” as W.W.II approached. So here I was, less than fifty miles on my way to wherever fate would take me. Florida? My birthplace in southern California perhaps? For I still remembered that 5th grade girl in a one-room schoolhouse in a small mountain town east of San Diego. Well, 50-mile progress seemed small, but I was 50 cents richer than when I started. In a few weeks I would be able to buy a camera. My ambition to become Richard Halliburton the Second soared.
By dark the second night a series of lucky rides took me into Scranton, exhausted after 36 hours without sleep. A policeman was approaching on the sidewalk, and, trying to look like a legitimate traveler, I asked him to direct me to the railroad station. It rather burst my balloon when he asked “which one?” and I mumbled “the nearest.” Well, he gave me some directions, but as I picked up my suitcase and started out as he had indicated, “Say-y-y,” he asked, “you didn’t run away from home, did you?” and all I could do as I walked faster was yell over my shoulder, “Oh no, oh no.”
Oh, sleep was welcome in a seat in an RR waiting room! That is until a guard shook me awake. “Sorry, young man, you can’t stay. It’s after midnight.” Several lucky rides, then a long walk in southern Pennsylvania as dawn broke through pale strips of alternate clouds and blue in the east, and poetry was bouncing around in my head which I should have written. Although feeling a little guilty about how my mother in New Hampshire must be worrying, writing home I would not, for fear that police somewhere would end my adventures. California was most on my mind, and I repeated in my head over and over some lines that were, I thought, much too flowery to be accepted by a publisher, but here they are:
Would I might roam where the poppy fields are golden
And dwell in a small cottage close by the sea
And with my violin make faery music
While the birds sing in the sweet orange tree.
Give me the land of the mariposa lily
Where I may sit in a eucalyptus grove
And watch the red sun on its redder ocean pathway
Bidding goodnight to the land that I love.
My third evening found me in Washington, D.C., and kind strangers directed me to the YMCA. There I was given a bed for the night, but now my resources were dwindling, as there had been no free food that day. A hot shower was most welcome but I still grit my teeth when I remember a more than finger-length cockroach in a corner of the shower stall.
Somewhere into Virginia I passed a cigarette factory as large as several city blocks with an eight-foot chain-link fence and green grass both inside and outside. A body was sprawled near the fence, and I stopped to check. It was an African-American. He had folded his sweater to use as a pillow and was very much alive and sleeping peacefully in the sun. What a contrast to the weather I had left in Troy! I had been on US Highway 1 for some time now. In those days this was the main highway from Maine to Key West, though today you can only trace it with difficulty on road maps dominated by superhighways that have been built since the 1930’s.
As late afternoon came on, approaching my fourth night, I spent my last 15 cents on a sandwich at a store called Andy’s Camp on the edge of South Hill, Virginia only 15 miles short of the North Carolina border. To the north and east of Andy’s Camp was a vast gently sloping hillside with many cabins widely scattered, perhaps 50 or 100 yards apart, each seeming too small to have more than one room, each with its backhouse, and each with its farm plot of produce or perhaps tobacco.
I sat on a stool at the sandwich counter talking with Andy, telling him of my plans to see and film the world, while late afternoon wore into evening. Eventually he invited me to spend the night on a couch in the back room, “Only watch out if my brother comes in drunk, for he’s a mean one!”
It turned out that Andy’s Camp was the social center for this cabin community. One by one folks drifted in, bought Andy’s beer or nipped from their pocket flasks. I got out my harmonica and did “Turkey in the Straw” and “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginy,” and soon an African-American, perhaps six-foot-six wearing knee-high boots (they call him Big Ray), took the middle of the floor and started tap-dancing to my tunes while most of the customers gathered their chairs into a circle around the two of us, clapping and stamping. Well, Andy’s Camp had evidently been around a good many years, and the pine floor was worn so thin that the knots stuck up above the rest of the wood. It seemed as though there was enough flexing that we must have been bouncing an inch or two while the goods on Andy’s shelves rattled in time.
But then came a sudden silence. The door had opened. A short heavyset man with protruding jaw and a slight stagger came in, eyes glowering. Andy whispered in my ear, “That’s my brother, don’t cross him.” A customer vacated a chair for him. Only by slow degrees did the party atmosphere resume, but Big Ray took a stool in a corner behind the pot stove. I sat close to him because I wanted to get acquainted, and I didn’t realize that Andy’s brother had moved his chair close behind me. Big Ray asked me where I was from. My habit had been, to avoid lying, to name the last big city I’d been in. I told him Washington. With an indulgent smile, Big Ray came back with, “Oh no, you isn’t! You’s f’um the eastern paht o’ New Yawk State!” Well, he was right, but to this day I wonder how my speech could have given me away, for I had lived in Troy such a very short time. But then I had no chance to wonder, for Andy’s brother sprang to his feet and he started around the pot stove shouting, “Ain’t no black guy gonna get away with talkin’ back to a white man like that around heah!” Big Ray slipped around the opposite side of the pot stove. The customers cleared the way for him as he dashed for the door.
My little adventure occurred only two years before John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published, and pales in insignificance compared to that horror story of man’s inhumanity to man. I had heard of the drought and the “dust bowl” but not of the bank foreclosures of thousands on thousands of hard working Oklahoma farmers. Their buildings were bulldozed to create the vast corporation farms of the future. Offers of employment in orchards of California caused a vast and useless migration of the “Okies,” a dozen of them for every single job available. Fruit pickers’ wages were cut from 30 cents to 2 ½ cents a box. Strikes and the beatings and shootings and clubbing to death of strikers by sheriffs and armed posses of growers—but read the book! These horrors west of the Mississippi totally escaped my attention while I was lost in my own little adventure.
So here I was, having spent my last cent at Andy’s Camp near South Hill, VA.; having had a fun time while Big Ray tap-danced to my harmonica; having been frozen to silence along with the crowd of farmer customers. Andy’s drunken brother, spoiling for a fight, had used Big Ray’s perfectly friendly remark to me as an excuse to pursue him as he slipped around the pot stove. Now the customers cleared the way as Big Ray dashed for the door. There was a five second delay as Andy’s brother looked us over with a scowl and then grabbed a full fifth of whiskey by the bottle neck and followed.
Then in the stony silence we became aware of the soft sound of rain, while an increasing wind banged the open door back and forth until Andy closed it. You have known when minutes seemed like hours. This was such a time. Just at first we were whispering, but the buzz increased in volume, voices expressing both fear and contempt for Andy’s brother. Then talk died out and we waited. And waited. Finally with a growl of triumph as the door opened, the drunk entered, holding high for all to see, the jagged-edged neck of the whiskey bottle. Horror went like a wave across the faces of Andy’s customers. The door was closed. The neck of the bottle was thrown in the corner behind the pot stove, right under the stool where Big Ray had been sitting. No one dared speak or move until Andy’s brother staggered through another door to the back room. Two or three of the customers rose to go home. We could hear slow steps and slipping and then more steps as the brother seemed to be struggling up a flight of stairs. Then silence again. Someone ordered a beer and Andy silently served him. The whole room could hear the sound of swallowing. Mostly, eyes were on the floor. The rain let up. Toward midnight, or so I thought, the door opened and Big Ray shuffled in, head bowed in silent resignation, and took his seat on the same stool in the corner. Much relieved, the customers left by twos and threes. Big Ray was last. Andy and I were alone.
“He’s snoring upstairs and won’t be up until noon. You’ll be perfectly safe on the couch. Help yourself to a candy bar when you leave.” The drama that had occurred outside that dark and rainy evening remains a mystery.
The next three days grow hazy in memory, dominated as they were by long hikes, short rides, grits and squash bread, nights out of sight of highway, washing sox and shorts in one stream or another, using my suitcase as a pillow. One morning when I knocked on a door, a white-haired little old lady handed me a hatchet and pointed to a pile of stove length wood. It was well seasoned soft pine, and in a half hour I split a pile 5 ft. long and up to her porch windowsill. Her thanks were unbounded, and she gave me a bowl of grits, my first ever, but not bad, smothered in so-called gravy, in this case pure bacon fat without even the usual flour to thicken it, but still not bad when you’re very, very hungry. Then to convey her gratitude still further, she wrapped three slices of squash bread in newspaper, “Made it ma’self. It’s keep y’all th’u the day.”
Swept out a restaurant one evening. They gave me half a dozen squash bread rolls. Another little old lady handed me a man-size ax and pointed to a pile of small branches behind her house. These were half dried oak, so the ax would more often bounce than cut. I wanted to please her, but after several hours she came out the back door. “Aw, come on in and stack it by the stove,” but it was a pitifully small half of an arm load. Once more it was “grits and gravy.”
Still another morning and a pleasant middle-aged red headed woman said she had no work, she’d already milked her cow, but wouldn’t I come in and share breakfast? She’d just made squash bread the day before, and it was “powerful good toasted.” Poor lonesome soul she just needed to talk. Hours of talk. Probably would have made a good book, but she rattled on so fast I couldn’t catch much of it. South Carolina wasn’t her native home, I gathered that much. Toward noon I said I had to be moving on, and she gave me a half a loaf of squash bread and said she’d pray God to bless me on my way.
Now I can assure you that three days of nothing but grits and squash bread are hard on the innards. There came a morning when I was half way through Georgia when I had my first long ride in several days with a young man driving a small truck which he used in his own hauling business. He took me to his home in Savannah, a small second floor flat, and gave me a breakfast of CORNFLAKES! WOW!—and MILK! We talked at some length and I told him of my plans, that Florida would be my next stop but I hadn’t been able to buy a camera yet. “Don’t cross into Florida if you’re broke. They’ll arrest you for vagrancy and put you to work on a chain gang.” Well, this was a switch. For years we had heard of Georgia chain gangs, but not Florida. He explained that the Georgia chain gangs had only hardened criminals, not mere vagrants. Finally I remarked that even if I failed to get a camera, I would have enough grist to start a writing career, and I told him about the events at Andy’s Camp. His face clouded as he got me a doughnut, and I thought he’d explode when, with raised voice, he exclaimed, “That’s the trouble with you damn Yankees, you come down here and see one thing like that and then you go back home and paint the South black as hell!” I protested that never in my life had I seen such a thing before. Certainly neither he nor I was aware of the horrors being experienced by the Okies in the west even as we talked. Finally he said I’d have a better chance to buy a camera and gather stories if I went to sea for awhile, and that sounded good to me.
At the merchant marine recruiting station in downtown Savannah I was signed up. They said they would take my dues to the Seaman’s Union out of my first month’s pay, come back tomorrow for a ship assignment. They gave me a half dollar to find a place to spend the night. But a half a dollar was a lot of money so I went exploring, wandering out to Savannah Beach. Now mosquitoes were after me, and I was experiencing a blizzard only a week before! At last I could see the blue of the ocean to the right, and the brick-red ocean to the left, where eroded soil from the Savannah River Basin was washed far out to the horizon. Here was a twenty foot drop to the sand of the beach with steps as wide as bleachers, and I sat listening to the breakers are out until the temptation became overwhelming and I left my shoes and sox under the bottom step and walked out to wade and cool my sore feet. It was nearly dark when I curled up under the lower steps, but sleep was not to be. A stiff breeze carrying sand stung my face. At the top of the bleachers was a row of houses with windows boarded up, one with a three foot wall around its porch, a perfect windbreak. In the morning the place where I had first tried to sleep was under water from the rising tide.
Why did thoughts of my mother and of friends and school overwhelm me as the sun rose that morning? My breakfast was a somewhat mashed squash bread roll from my pocket. It was a fifteen mile tramp from Savannah Beach, South Carolina, back to the center of Savannah, Georgia. Then more or less north, far into the country where the flat straight highway stood several feet above a swamp full of hummocks or small islands. Day turned to brilliant moonlit night, and when weariness took over, there was a brief respite on one of those islands. Mosquitoes again. A few twigs and grass, and soon a small fire. Have you ever noticed how a circle of darkness closes around you when you light a fire, even under a brilliant moon? Then the sounds of living swamp creatures, weird voices and splashing, and soon I was back on the road.
It’s easy to leave the “straight and narrow” and so hard to get back on it. I cannot remember the details, but after eight more days I was in Raleigh, North Carolina. I had no camera, no money. My sister wired me train fare. Back at school there was a mixture of ridicule and admiring envy.
When my wife was a schoolgirl she heard one of Richard Halliburton’s lectures. Then in 1938 he started to cross the Pacific in a Chinese “junk." On March 24, 1939 his radio reported severe waves a little short of Midway, but he and his crew were never heard from again.
