We had loaded our Town Car the night before with copies of our facsimile of The Complete Official Guide to the Lincoln Highway, Fifth Edition (1924). I love that old book, which not only lists each of the 400+ towns along the 3,389-mile road, but also carries hundreds of ads featuring the automobiles, automotive products, hotels, and restaurants. With the trunk full of a half-ton of books, the old girl (the car) was pretty goosy, and she tended to fishtail at 80 mph. I drove carefully until I got used to it.

   Neither of us cares much for travel on the interstates, but we took I-10 east from Tucson to Las Cruces, N.Mex. We turned north there on U.S. 70 toward Alamogordo. Kathy had never seen White Sands National Monument—we fixed that with a photo stop. Then we took the long drive through New Mexico on U.S. 54 to I-40, then east where we started picking up signs that we are on or near to the Daughter Road, Route 66. Then to our first overnight, the Microtel in Tucumcari, N.Mex.

   Another early start and we ditched the interstate to head north on U.S. 54 out of Tucumcari, nicking the northwest corner of the both the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles. When we were at Guymon Kathy wanted to detour some thirty miles west to see the Santa Fe Trail. I persuaded her that it would be more fun and not at all out of the road to do it on the way back.

   We stayed on 54 and paused for a late lunch stop in Meade, Kans., then sped to Wichita and beyond, always on 54. Actually, we made every bit as good time on that two-lane highway as we could have on boring I-40. We pulled into Fort Scott, Kans., at dark. We found another Microtel, then to a nice old Mexican restaurant in town.

   After dinner Kathy learned that the restored Fort Scott was only two blocks away, and that girl never saw a fort she didn’t like. So, with everything closed, the night pitch black, and sprinkling rain, we had to tour Fort Scott.

   We drove into Missouri, actually into the beautiful Ozarks, still largely unspoiled. Through Macks Creek, Roach, Linn Creek—towns Missourians love to make fun of but towns that those same people would love to call home. Kathy was fascinated by Lake of the Ozarks. I first visited it in 1951 and it was twenty years old then.

   Then we headed up to Jefferson City to catch U.S. 50, which twisted west through Linn, Rosebud, and Union, and on into St. Louis. That was one fast shoot—we had to be at the home of Fred Kemp, celebrating his birthday that night with a jam session. Six of the seven musicians were of absolutely top caliber. Fred, who played his way through Washington University’s architectural school, is a modern version of Fats Waller. He took delivery of a new Baldwin grand piano that afternoon. On tuba and banjo were Don Franz and Al Stricker, respectively, of the St. Louis Ragtimers. John Hegedus, the drummer, replaced me in 1978 as leader of Tiger Rag Forever Jazz Band. Trombone and clarinet players were Chris Putsche and Mike Lilley, respectively, newer members of the old TRF. This old man has played a lot of gigs since turning pro in 1941, but none as exciting as this one.

   Off to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri’s oldest city. The people of Ste. Genevieve get the credit for the first book published by The Patrice Press, The Story of Old Ste. Genevieve. So whatever they want from this old man, they git. They wanted us to publish Carl Ekberg’s monograph, the biography of Louis Bolduc. Bolduc built the famed Bolduc House in Ste. Genevieve in 1793, and it was meticulously restored in the late 1950s. It is the premier example of a French Colonial vertical log structure in America. Dr. Ekberg had won many prizes for his book, Colonial Ste. Genevieve (Patrice, 1985, 1996). (My book is now in its sixth printing. Some 40,000 are out there.)

   We return to St. Louis, pick up Betty the Libral and her three wonderful Burnett grandchildren for an afternoon at Missouri Botanical Garden. Great fun to be with all of them.

   Heading north now to start the business at hand, the book tour. We stopped at Chain of Rocks City Park, on the Mississippi River just downstream from the bridge that carried Route 66 into St. Louis. We drove on the east side of the river to Hannibal. Kathy had never been there before. Here’s an interesting exercise in relativity—Ste.Genevieve: Hannibal::Lincoln Highway:Route 66. A ghastly Super 8 in Quincy was our home away from home this night.

   We traveled north on Ill. 96 to Hamilton, then east to Carthage, where I saw the famous Carthage Jail for the first time. This is the site of the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, founders of the LDS church. Then to Nauvoo where we saw the reconstructed LDS temple just prior to its dedication.

Traveling north on a combination of highways, we reached Fulton and the Lincoln Highway about 3, where we were met by Carl and Ruth Jacobson of Aurora, and Harvey Wiebenga of Fulton. Harvey toured us through Fulton’s massive windmill, "Das Immigrant," which he and a delegation of Fultonites had brought from Holland. It is an amazing piece of engineering, and it really works. It is a block downstream from the point where the old Lincoln Highway entered Illinois from Clinton, Iowa.

   Let’s talk about the book tour itself. It is a slide show based on a number of images copied from the 1924 Road Guide. Lots of fun talking about the old cars—Studebakers, Packards, Model T Fords, and Nashes. But interspersed with these were copies of photographs made by the field secretaries of the original Lincoln Highway Association—all from the Illinois scrapbook archived at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The show takes about fifty minutes, and usually is followed by fifteen or more minutes of questions.

   Our first program that night was at the Fulton Historical Society’s elegant Martin House. A warm and friendly crowd, but it was my first program and I thought it was terribly rough. But we sold lotsa books.

Wednesday, May 1

   We traveled U.S. 30, the old Lincoln Highway, east to Sterling, then proceeded on Ill. 38 to Dixon, and along the way rolled over one of Illinois’s three Seedling Miles. The original Lincoln Highway Association would provide enough cement to pave one mile, if the county would provide everything else needed to turn it into a concrete highway. It had to be built in a muddy stretch outside of town. Motorists would churn through the mud to the slab, mount it, and race to the other end with the windshield wide open—sometimes as fast as thirty miles an hour! And drop down in the mud again at the other end. It was a most effective technique to promote good roads.

  During the day we toured the routes of the Lincoln Highway in and near Franklin Grove, headquarters town for our national Lincoln Highway Association, then drove back west a few miles to Dixon. The program at the Loveland Community Building in Dixon was somewhat smoother and the crowd also was friendly.

   We were met in Rochelle by Roxanne Charnock of the tourism board, who took us to lunch at the country club with Mayor Robert Gingerich. Then she led us along the Lincoln through town. We stopped at a beautiful restoration of a Standard station, which probably will become a tourist information center for Rochelle. After the tour we were fêted at a gala dinner held for us at the country club—about sixteen people were there. We were honored, of course.

   It was a very pleasant drive to Geneva on Ill. 38, the old Lincoln Highway. I have never seen a prettier hunk of the Lincoln than Shroeder Road, east of DeKalb. We came to Malta and the first Seedling Mile poured in the United States (1914). It was, in fact, considerably more than a mile. The farmer at the bottom of the hill wanted it extended to his place and he had the bucks to pay for it.

  We turned south in Geneva onto Ill. 31, just as the Lincoln Highway did, to head into Batavia. We met Carla Hill there at the depot museum—and she promptly took us to lunch. Later, Mayor Jeff Schilke toured us over their river walk, paved with hundreds of bricks in which the names of donors were incised—they cost fifty bucks apiece and Jeff sold most of them himself.

   The program in city hall was a doozy. All the chairs were filled fifteen minutes before the talk was to start—dozens more were carried in. Who should show up but Joan Bulkeley Stade, the daughter of the late Admiral John D. Bulkeley. Joan wrote our new book, Twelve Handkerchiefs, the biography of her amazing mother, Alice Wood Bulkeley.

   This tour was organized so well that we had to backtrack just once—from Batavia to DeKalb. How well I remember our tour for our Maps of the California Trail where we had to cross Donner Pass eight times in two weeks. The DeKalb program was a first for us—it was held in a retirement home. Thanks to the efforts of Henry Leonard it was a good audience and they bought books.

   We backtracked east through Batavia and south through Aurora, still following the route of the Lincoln Highway. The old highway south of Aurora is well maintained and has an aspect that couldn’t have changed much from the late 1920s: dairy farms and newly planted fields lined the narrow road on both sides.

   Heading into Matteson, we stopped to check in at the Holiday Inn Convention Center. Bob Lukens, of the Chicago

   So there are Bob, Cynthia, Pete, Kathy, and me. Because the museum is in a residential area several blocks from downtown Matteson, there was concern that there wouldn’t be many more, and that many of those twenty-five chairs would be empty. Cynthia started showing alarm about twenty minutes before the program was to start, as people started filing in. Then she and Pete started toting chairs—more and more, until there was room for no more. Kathy counted about sixty people, and nearly fifteen standing in the back.

   What an exhilarating program that was! People were laughing joyously, not so much at the jokes but at life in 1924, as portrayed in the Road Guide. Like most sponsors, Cynthia had provided platters of cookies and vats of black coffee.

 Driving the Lincoln Highway to Frankfort, we stopped on Locust Street to look at damage. Here was a pristine stretch of the old Lincoln, just a few yards from U.S. 30. Sure, it was rough and overgrown, and bicyclists were crabbing about that. So loudly that the city fathers decided to put a new coat of asphalt over the whole works. The Illinois Lincoln Highway Association members found their vocal cords and protested just as loudly. The powers that be decided to effect a compromise and paved exactly half the old road, leaving the other half pristine. Stupid, of course, but better than nothing, I guess.

Highway. Henry Ostermann, the field secretary of the original Lincoln Highway Association, was killed east of Montour, Iowa, in June 1920, when his white Packard rolled over and crushed him. The Ideal Section was a four-lane road more than a mile long, between Dyer and Schererville, Indiana.

   We were hours early, so we decided to take in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. I’m telling you this was one cold experience. Arizonans are thin-skinned anyway, and with the temperature around sixty degrees and a wind stirring up whitecaps on Lake Michigan, it was anything but pleasant. Kathy loved it.

   Then came a big treat, by the name of Art Schweitzer. Art is the most energetic promoter of the Lincoln Highway in Indiana, if not the nation. He’s the guy who persuaded the highway department to allow him to make molds so that the name, Lincoln Highway, could be cast into the walls of the new bridges being built along the Ideal Section.

   Art took us to dinner at Teibel’s Ideal Family Restaurant, right on the Lincoln Highway. It was there in the heyday of the Lincoln, too. Art also provided a tour of the area’s trouble spots, where the old highway is endangered.

   Since we had freeloaded our lodging all across Illinois, we decided not to break the habit in Indiana and stayed two nights with my way-older brother Fred, in Hobart. He remembered me. He thinks.

   We have a 1925 photograph in our files of a gristmill along the original Lincoln Highway, now Old State Highway 2, west of Schererville, and wondered if it managed to survive the seventy-seven years between then and now. It has.

   Our program this night was at the Porter County Library in Valparaiso, Indiana. Phyllis Nelson, director of the library, did a nice job of rounding up folks who enjoyed the presentation.

Thursday, May 9

   Our luck on freebie lodging at an end, we decided to stay at the Mishawaka Days Inn. Boy, talk about a fleabag! The only people who liked it were the spiders who seemed to have shared our room.

   We headed for Goshen over the old Lincoln Highway, passing through Elkhart along the way. Goshen is one of those delightful little Midwest towns that somehow has managed to preserve its business district. We took the time to walk a few blocks of the area, and right around the corner from the chamber of commerce building, where we were to give our talk, was a Lincoln High- way-era garage, with the date 1917 in its coping. One of the last slides of our program is a view of the Ft. Wayne arch.

Marion Troyer, retired from Goshen’s Troyer Photographic Studio, had a little present for me, a slide of a 1914 view of Goshen’s welcome sign. We promptly put it in the projector, killed the lights, and shot it up on the screen. Delightful, and the crowd loved it. We had Laura Coine and Earlene Nofsiger, of the Goshen Historical Society, to thank for that crowd.

   There were a couple of must stops on the Lincoln Highway before we got down to business in Fort Wayne. First, there were some brick stretches south of Ligonier that we had to find. In the old days the highway was respectful of section lines, and when the Lincoln had to turn, it was usually at a right angle because the county officials didn’t want to condemn a farmer’s land—that cost money and reduced the tax base. Later, in federal highway days, the gradual curves were put in, leaving the square corners behind. A little over a mile southeast of Ligonier on U.S. 33, the old Lincoln Highway, we looked straight ahead and there was a beautiful brick stretch, where 33 curved away to the south.

   Then, a must stop on anybody’s itinerary, is the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn. The elegant old Cord dealership has been restored, and the place just filled with classic cars, many of which would bring seven figures in the marketplace. I had to be careful when walking, to keep from slipping on my own drool.

   So it was over. The best of our several book tours. We headed southwest on I-69, one of the more scenic interstate highways, then circled around Indianapolis to get on I-70. We had to get on the interstates because we wanted to make Terre Haute yet that night, and we did. Checked in at the Pear Tree Inn. Nobody to freeload off of from here on.

Sunday, May 12

   I wanted to show Kathy the old magnificent Black Jack ruts, just east of Baldwin City, Kansas.

    Next stop—the wonderful old stage station at Simmons Point, east of Overbrook. It is gradually disintegrating. Several years ago I was with George Maichel, the Overbrook veterinarian, who owns the place. On viewing the remains of the east wall of the two-story structure, which had collapsed into the basement, he said, "I guess you think I’m a terrible housekeeper.

   We drove on past Dodge City, leaving 56 and getting on U.S. 50, the highway which most closely follows the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. But when we reached the little town of Cimarron, we turned south on Kansas 23. Cimarron is one of the several middle crossings of the Cimarron Cutoff. We wanted to see the spring freshet in the Arkansas River. We stopped and walked across seeing nothing but sand. The river in mid-May was bone dry.

   When we were thirteen miles south of Cimarron we turned southwest on U.S. 56, probably over the cutoff leading from Dodge. We followed 56 for only another thirteen miles, to turn west onto Kansas 144, which soon joined U.S. 160. We turned south in Ulysses onto Kansas 25, which slants to the southeast about nine miles south of town. We continued straight south, however, and followed the signs to Wagon Bed Spring.

   There were, and still are, several springs in the area of the lower springs, but we feel this one is the main lower spring. The Cimarron, less than a mile away, is now totally dry, the huge irrigation pumps having lowered the water table to such an extent that the fringe of cottonwoods which once bordered the stream died, and most have now rotted away.

   It was here, evidently, that Indians lanced the greatest mountain man, Jedediah Smith in 1831, as he was getting his last drink of water.

   Now we are fresh out of time. Our firm contracted to exhibit at Tucson’s convention of the Mormon History Association, so we had to skedaddle home. We continued on 56 to enter New Mexico at Clayton, continuing west to Springer, where we got onto I-25. We had hoped to make it to Tucson yet this day, but that would have been nearly 700 miles, so we left the interstate at Hatch and headed southwest to Deming for the night at the Best Western Mimbres Valley.

   Home in early afternoon, where we picked up almost a full bushel of mail.

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   Now we need some guidance from our readers. This is a long story. We crab at nobody, and that’s really a switch. We know that many of our friends travel very little, and perhaps this adventure would be of interest to them. If you liked this story let us know, because we have another adventure we would like to share with you. We took a wonderful tour of the Carson Route of the California Trail with our old pal, Frank (or as we say, "Phranque") Tortorich, followed by our tenth annual convention of the Lincoln Highway Association in Sacramento.

   On the other hand, if this one has bored you stiff, we need to know that also. Send a card or a letter, please, to The Old Man, The Patrice Press, Box 85639, Tucson AZ 85754-5639; or email to wagonmaster@patricepress.com Thanks for listening.