I thank you all for the privilege of speaking at today’s event.  I am humbled that you would ask me to do this and I only hope that I do you, and the men and the families that we honor, justice.

When Chester McConnell asked me for a title for my talk, I realized that I could do no better than the words inscribed at our nation’s World War II Memorial in Washington, DC.  Those words are:  “Here we mark the price of freedom.”  

That is exactly what we do today.  By remembering our veterans, we pause to mark the price – in years from home, in sweat and toil, and sometimes in their own blood – they paid in the past for our freedom today.  Thanks to your group’s research, we know many of those veterans from Pine Hill by name.

They were men like Chester’s older brother Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class George Raymond McConnell, one of the 644 sailors lost with a Japanese submarine sank the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay in the Gilbert Islands on November 24, 1943.

They were men like Gunner’s Mate Third Class Willie Autery, Jr., a nineteen year-old sailor on board the cruiser USS Juneau.  Juneau was sunk by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands on November 13, 1942.  623 American sailors, to include all five of the Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, perished in her sinking.  Only 10 men survived.  Willie was not one of them.

They were men like Platoon Sergeant Enoch “Hugie” Shoultz, United States Marines, killed in action on Iwo Jima on the tenth day of battle as he led a patrol trying to clear the island’s volcanic terrain of snipers.

They were men like Private First Class Allen G. “Van” Johnson, who served with the U.S. Army’s 9^th Infantry Division and who was killed in action in Tunisia on April 3, 1943.

They were men like Captain Marshall D. Godbold, who lost his life serving with the U.S. Army in Burma, half a world away, and who is buried in this very cemetery.

And there are many others that we remember today – if not by naming them, then at least by our presence.

But we Americans are not the only ones who remember our American veterans.  If I may, let me tell you about a town in the Czech Republic.  The town is called Slavicin.  It is about the size of Camden, and sits nestled in the foothills of the White Carpathian Mountains.  Like so many of you, its residents made a living farming and in the timber trade.

Sixty-seven years ago, on August 29, 1944, the United States unleashed an air raid against the Czech city of Moravska Ostrava, which lies to the north of Slavicin.  Moravska Ostrava’s oil refinery provided fuel for the Third Reich; its railway marshalling yard helped funnel German troops to the Eastern Front.

The American B-17 Flying Fortress crews that flew against Moravska Ostrava that day had hoped for what the men called a “milk run.”  But the mission against Moravska Ostrava was anything but a milk run.  Between 70 and 80 German fighters ambushed the seven bombers of the 20th Squadron.  That squadron, by the way, was led by a young pilot from Carbon Hill, Alabama, named Bill Tune.

In twenty minutes of brutal fighting, all seven Flying Fortresses fell victim to the enemy fighters.  Their flaming wrecks exploded in the air or crashed into the thick evergreen forests, farmers’ fields, and meadows around Slavicin and other Czech towns and villages.  By the end of the battle, 40 men of the 20^th Squadron were dead, 26 – mostly wounded – were captured, and only 4 managed to make it back to Allied lines.

After the air battle, the Germans gathered the remains of those airmen from the crash sites around Slavicin.  In total, there were 28 bodies. 

Two days after the air battle, on August 31, 1944, the Germans dug a large rectangular pit in the cemetery at Slavicin’s St. Adalbert Catholic Church and, in that mass grave, buried the American fliers.  The Germans refused to allow the local Czechs – whose country, you might recall, had been ruled by Hitler as a Nazi “protectorate” since 1939 – to be present, although the local priest managed to convince the German garrison commander to allow him to perform a funeral service.  When the grave was filled, the Germans marked the site with a wooden plaque that simply read “28 American Fliers – Died August 29, 1944 – Buried August 31, 1944.” 

In the days after the service was concluded, local Czechs began bringing flowers to the mass grave.  The Germans quickly moved to stop the practice, sending a town crier around Slavicin who beat his drum and read the German order prohibiting any more flowers from being placed on the grave site.

So what does any of this have to do with Pine Hill, you may be asking yourselves.

I will tell you.  It has nothing to do with Pine Hill.  And it has everything to do with Pine Hill.

Let me continue.

A year later, after the war in Europe ended and the German occupation of Slavicin had ended, the townspeople gathered to have a proper funeral service for the American fliers.  Then, in 1946, the American military came to Slavicin and, in a dignified, ceremonious effort, exhumed the 28 bodies.  Some were reburied at the American military cemetery in St. Avold, France; others were returned home to be buried in cemeteries much like this one.

But even then, the people of Slavicin did not forget the young Americans who gave their life for a free Europe – and a free world – on August 29, 1944. 

On August 29, 1994, Slavicin hosted several of the surviving airmen and family members of the fallen in a ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle.  A formal stone monument, inscribed with the names of the deceased airmen, was dedicated and, that Sunday, a special mass was held.  The tradition of an annual special mass continues to their very day, I am told, and a similar memorial celebration was held in 2004.

When I researched and wrote the story of the 20^th Bombardment Squadron, I learned of the Czech people’s long memories of this battle and the men who lost their lives in it.  I also learned of their tradition of honoring, not their war dead, but our war dead from that battle.  And I was humbled by that knowledge – and a little saddened, to be honest with you.  I am not sure that we Americans even go to those lengths to honor our own veterans.  For us, even Veterans Day itself is too often simply an excuse for a day off from school, to close the bank, or to have a sale at the mall.

But not here in Pine Hill.  Here, you have heartened me.  You have not ceded the memory of our fallen veterans to distant nations.  You have not forgotten them. 

Instead, you have kept the faith.  Here, you have taken the time to pause, to remember our veterans, and, in doing so, to say “thank you.”  And for that, I thank you.  God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.

This is the time to celebrate your favorite author, filmmaker, artist or historian. This is the time to pass on to a friend your favorite book, or recommend a beloved song. This is the month to pull close your children or grandchildren and tell them about your family’s history. Take this month to explore your hometown, or a new town you’ve never visited in Alabama. Learn about the structures there, the culture, the people…learn more about your history as an Alabamian.

Take the time to learn more about the humanities…and more about yourself.

“My own contribution to outreach probably received more recognition than it deserved because others were due most of the credit for our success. Nevertheless, in 1989, I received a University Extension Certificate of Merit. That same year, the Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) asked me to write a piece to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, centering on the work of AHF in strengthening community life through public programming. Despite a variety of deadlines, I agreed. “Habits of the Heart in the Heart of Dixie” was my attempt to place AHF’s outreach effort into broad social context.

Rural and small town migration patterns, urban complexity, and the atomization of American life threatened venerable traditions of community life. Books as divergent as The Different Drum:  Community Making and Peace by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Community in American Life by Robert N. Bellah and others had placed the issue front and center on the nation’s agenda.

The age of air conditioners, the disappearance of front porches, the decline of church revivals, and the vanishing court and market days were locking us into progressively smaller cubicles, rooms, offices, and other stifling spaces, largely away from one another. Folks no longer learned so easily about the needs of others. Modern society might produce less small town gossip and petty intrigue. But it most certainly contained less neighborliness and willingness to be bothered by someone else’s troubles. This pulling away from community, this decreasing ability to connect meaningfully, to share important common symbols, had fractured and weakened social relationships and communal identity.

Rebuilding a sense of community is no easy matter. It first requires explaining what it means to be human. Such definitions emerge from religion, philosophy, literature, music, art, drama, speech, and history. This public redefinition requires that practitioners of the humanities occasionally take leave of their classrooms, where many of their seeds fall on the hard, sterile ground of career-building and degree-chasing anyway (or sometimes on adolescents not even that serious). We have to engage the community of adults who do not take our importance for granted. The larger community is not so much hostile to us as it is preoccupied with more urgent concerns: earning a living; nurturing families; preserving neighborhoods; coping with divorce, sickness, and death. Ordinary people do not perceive that humanists (a term they generally don’t understand anyway) have much to contribute to their prosaic comings and goings, their quality of life, or the stability of the places where they live. Nor do we make much effort to persuade them of our relevance. Our efforts in AHF, Auburn’s History and Heritage Festivals, Reading Alabama, and other Humanities Center programs had been but halting first steps at opening that dialogue.”

How has humanities programming touched your life?

It is here, in this storied town’s center, where the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibit “Journey Stories” is housed in the United Way building at 19 Main Street. Walking in the door this Wednesday, I was happy to see a group of students from William L. Radney Elementary School, a sixth-grade class, listening intently to Terry Jones, a volunteer with the Main Street organization, tell the story of our country, how our ancestors traveled here and how they journeyed west across the continent, looking for a better life.

“Journey Stories” is a Museum on Main Street exhibition, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and the Alabama Humanities Foundation. The exhibit examines the intersection between modes of travel and Americans’ desire to feel free to move. The stories are diverse and focus on immigration, migration, innovation and freedom. “Journey Stories” uses engaging images with audio and artifacts to tell the individual stories that illustrate the critical roles travel and movement have played in building our diverse American society.

Right now, “Journey Stories” can be seen in Alexander City through Sept. 23. It will then move on to:

Marion — Sept. 28-Nov. 10
Mobile — Nov. 16-Dec. 27
Eufaula — Jan. 6, 2012-Feb. 15
Arab — Feb. 24-April 5

Watching the children view the exhibit panels, and seeing them explore Alexander City’s own complementary exhibit across the street in the lobby of City Hall, you can see their minds whirling. They are making connections between the settlers and their own ancestors. They are understanding why people come to America to seek out a better life. Perhaps they are contemplating their own “Journey Stories”—trips taken with parents and grandparents to Mt. Rushmore, Civil War battlegrounds, or Yellowstone National Park.

We all have a journey story to tell. Come see America’s “Journey Stories” in Alexander City or an Alabama town near you! And, if you would like to tell your own journey story here on AHF’s blog, please email it to: jdome@ahf.net.

We look forward to taking the journey with you!

Christopher Columbus (C.C.) Davenport, Eliza’s brother, originally published Looking Backward: Memoirs of the Early Settlement of Morehouse Parish in 1911, as a compilation of weekly columns he’d had written while serving as editor of the Mer Rouge Democrat. Lida’s second cousin, Tommy Davenport Rankin, gave us copies of the memoirs, which the local Lions Club had recently reprinted in pamphlet form. Tommy still farms cotton and soybeans on lands that the Davenport family has held for nearly 200 years in Morehouse Parish.

As reminiscences of early life on the Louisiana frontier and as a record of Lida’s family history, C.C.’s memoirs by themselves would be a wonderful treasure of local history and genealogy. But the final chapter reveals why they are so much more than that.

Chapter XV, “Life on the Plantation When the Negroes Were Slaves,” represents C.C.’s careful effort to portray how humanely his father, James Barlow Davenport, treated his 110 slaves on the family plantation. C.C. writes that his father provided the slaves with good housing, food, clothing and medical care. He gave them small plots of land for gardening and paid them cash for some of the cotton they picked. He provided a children’s nursery, and he permitted religious services and marriages among the slaves. After James died in 1858, C.C., Eliza and their brothers took charge of the plantation and even added a “plantation negro band.”

C.C. goes on to write:

There was no law against the whipping of slaves, but it was seldom done, and, when done it was generally inflicted because of fusses—quarrels among themselves. All disagreements and troubles among the slaves were settled by the owners of the slaves. The courts were not troubled by negro trials. It was a rare thing to see a negro in jail or in a penitentiary…As a rule, masters were kind to their slaves. Occasionally there were cruel masters and, occasionally there were bad negroes that required severe punishment.

He concludes:

Those were happy days that can never be recalled, but it was Southern life and the negroes of that day were happier, much happier than I have ever seen them since those days.

And so C.C. Davenport sums up in his memoirs the near universal attitude of Southern whites at the beginning of the 20th century, as they attempted to justify the system of slavery that had existed within their own lifetimes—and in his case within his own life. Although he doesn’t acknowledge it, 1911 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Since he ended the memoirs in 1860, he also doesn’t mention that he and his brothers all served in the Confederate army. None were killed in the war, and C.C. went on to become a successful farmer, state representative and active civic leader. But did he don his old uniform of the Twelfth Louisiana Infantry, Army of Tennessee, to commemorate the anniversary? Did his rosy reflections on his own slaves help to perpetuate the myth of the “Lost Cause”—a romantic view of the Confederacy and its defeat—that swept the agrarian South during Reconstruction and reached a crescendo with the 50th anniversary celebrations? Was his pen—innocently I believe—an instrument of Jim Crow? History and family lore don’t point to anyone’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, for example.

From the vantage point of another century’s passage, I prefer simply to point out the irony of his writing in 1911. I also hasten to note that his sister, Eliza Davenport Cotten, and her descendants quietly but substantively contributed to Eliza’s adopted city of Birmingham. This includes Lida’s family standing against racism during the city’s darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement. In their journeys Americans—and Southerners in particular—have passed through time as well as space. Along the way, thankfully, they tossed many old ideas into the rushing streams of history.

By AHF Board member Bob Whetstone

On this cool September morning, we’re sipping coffee in Cousin Ron’s yard high on a west Duluth hill, watching the fog rise off majestic Lake Superior below. A collector of classic antique cars, Ron is deep into the subject when he pauses. “Ya’ know,” he says in that characteristic Minnesota twang, “I watch the weekend races on TV, but one thing I’d like to do before I kick the bucket is to see a live race at Talladega.”

Before I can react to his bucket list confession, Ron’s wife pipes up, “You betcha’, we’re gonna do just that, Ron. I want you to see that race. It’ll be your birthday present.” I play along with the dream and offer that we’ll have a room ready for them at our house—and we’ll start working on finding finish-line tickets. “You guys will love the races,” Ron adds. I shake my head to make sure I heard the words correctly. Yes, I heard right. It’s just that I have never pictured myself sitting in the stands at the SuperSpeedway.

The Sunday of the big race we rise at dawn and travel our carefully plotted, less-travelled route from Winterboro to the race track. Merging into six-lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, we snail along the last leg and frantically pull in to the first weeded field we see. My wife calls out the checklist: “hat, sunscreen, sunglasses, seat cushions, tissues, earplugs, camera, tickets, coolers. OK, let’s go.” We open the doors of our cool air-conditioned car to be slapped in the face by a wall of 100-degree heat. But we stand steadfast, don our sun hats, clutch our heavy, well-stocked coolers and are caught up in the swell of sweaty bodies that is flowing, we hope, towards the infield tramway tunnel. A long walk later the crowd thins out and we can see the tunnel. Wishing to gain the full flavor of this experience we take a short tram ride and disembark at the infield. Intent on sneaking a closer look at the 38 fire-breathing dragons before they are rolled out of their garages onto the two-and-a-half mile oval track, we determinedly lug our coolers through an aluminum village of motor homes and trailers, flash our infield passes before the security guards at the gate only to be halted and told we need special, i.e., more expensive, tickets to enter the garage area. The heavy coolers stretch our arms as we return to the tram and exit the infield. We’re stopped at the entrance because our coolers do not meet size and material requirements for carriage into the grandstand, so we hide our supply of bottled water, Cokes and ice under a truck, not caring at this point if they’re there when the race is over.

As we enter the ramp to the stadium, Ron points out the long row of colorfully decorated 18-wheelers outside the fence, similar to a carnival midway. He explains the barkers are hawking each driver’s souvenirs and memorabilia. Settling in our finish-line seats, I covertly study these race fanatics. Well, I think we may have the only arms and thighs in this virtual sea of sparsely-clad multi-toned skin not bearing tattoos. No, wait, there is one clear canvas—a small fan sleeping soundly in an infant seat amidst the clamor.

Heads bow in reverence as the pre-race ceremony begins. The invocation, laden with auto racing metaphors, closes  and a slow, drawn-out rendition of the National Anthem rises but is drowned out when a dual-wheel monster truck with a huge American flag waving from its rear barrels down the track competing with the ear-splitting roar of a flyover by two jet bombers. A row of convertibles parades around the track to deliver the drivers to their predetermined starting positions. A well-known football coach takes the mike and announces, “Drivers, start your engines,” and a deafening roar erupts. We hurriedly insert our earplugs before the Aaron 499 race begins. After circling the two-and-a-half mile oval once, the 38 racecars begin to pair off like love bugs at Gulf Shores.

As we mop sweat from our faces and cover our professionally plugged ears with our hands, our race-savvy cousins explain that it is usual for spectators to wander among the army of food and souvenir vendors during the middle third of the race, so we do just that. However, as we stand eating hot dogs and surrounded by the smell of cotton candy, popcorn, and cigarette smoke, we glance toward the track into the grandstand and see the true, die-hard fans in their favorite driver’s caps and T-shirts, eyes glued to the track. They periodically rise to dance and cheer for the lead car or to gape at a crash and then rush to the wire fence to snap a photo. I finally gain courage to return to my seat.

After several hours and 278 laps the final 10 draw everyone to their feet—yes, even these two Alabama race rookies and their Minnesota cousins, to witness the jockeying for position among the lead couplets. The roaring engines, the fumes, the vibrations of the grandstand as dozens of dynamos whiz down the final stretch make me feel as though I am a passenger travelling with them on their journey. The final car crosses the finish line and we are swept up in the rolling tide of race fans as we exit and locate our abandoned coolers. We retrieve icy cold bottles and pause to slake our thirst in preparation for the walk to our car and the final departure from my first and my last race.

My ears still ringing, I think about the drivers, some now celebrating, some mourning. I wonder about that handful of cars, the crushed dreams of the drivers unable to complete the race. For all 38 drivers, today’s long 499-mile journey has ended at the checkered flag where it began.

The first week of the 1933-34 school year their eighth-grade teacher makes an announcement that turns Alton inside out: “During the year each pupil will take a turn giving the morning devotional.” As the days of September move too quickly, John’s turn comes before Alton’s. He confidently delivers a reading from the Bible, makes a brief comment and whispers to Alton as he takes a seat, “You see, nothing to it.” But Alton’s anxiety is not assuaged.

Alton’s day of dread has arrived. The school bell rings, students assemble in their desks—but Alton’s seat in the back of the room remains empty. Just as the tardy bell sounds, Alton slips quietly into the classroom, a guitar slung across his shoulder. A loud buzz punctuated by periodic giggles fills the room, until the teacher silences the sounds with a snap of her fingers and announces, “Alton has decided to sing a hymn as his devotional and you will give him and his message all due respect.” As his sweating fingers strum the opening chords, the harmony bolsters his courage, dissolves his tension, and steadies his shaky voice, “As I travel through this pilgrim land, there is a friend who walks with me. . .” The gospel hymn, “Jesus, Hold My Hand,” seems only too appropriate.

My Uncle Alton played guitar, bass and saxophone in my father’s “hillbilly” band throughout my childhood and entertained us kids with snappy little ditties until he answered Uncle Sam’s call to duty in WWII. However, this self-taught musician never mentioned those unique eighth-grade musical devotionals. In a recent conversation I had with 90-year-old Governor John Patterson, he firmly recalled my uncle’s friendship and music and he related the morning devotional incident with amazing clarity. Gov. Patterson also remembered how the two friends had to say goodbye shortly after eighth grade when John’s father, Albert Patterson, made the fateful decision to move his family to Phenix City and enter Alabama’s political arena.

The official 2011 state theme for Alabama is The Year of Music. The thread that binds together much of this state’s cultural history is its music and stories, like those told by John Patterson, some of which enriched my own personal history with stories of my musically talented, late Uncle Alton Whetstone.

By Cynthia Martin, AHF Programs and Development Assistant

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  Confucius

I recently took a journey of over 7,000 miles that began as I stepped over to the computer and signed onto Facebook. His name was “Brother Rama” and he was from India. He graduated from a college in the United States with several of my friends. They all spoke very highly of him and his ministry to people with HIV/AIDS in India. Still, I was totally unprepared for what occurred when I befriended him on Facebook and viewed his pictures for the first time. The precious people in those pictures reached out and grabbed my heart. For me, they could not remain nameless faces in some far away land. I had to know their names, I had to go there, and I had to meet them.

As my friend and I were preparing to go to India, the plans went slightly awry due to her job. Instead of the two of us traveling together for the entire duration of the trip, I was going alone for one week prior to her arrival. I had never gone to a foreign country before, especially not alone. (Well, visiting Mexico with a large youth group in the 1980s doesn’t count.) A somewhat apprehensive lady stepped on a plane in Birmingham headed all alone to India. A confident, although suffering from jet-lag and slightly sick, lady stepped off a plane at the same airport three weeks later.

It was a journey unlike one I had ever experienced before. It wasn’t just traveling on an airplane to a foreign land. It opened up new opportunities in other areas of my life as well. Many people have suggested I write a book about my life history. I felt so inadequate in my writing skills that I had not done it. I decided to “test” my writing abilities by starting a blog to keep others informed of my trip to India. It was adeptly entitled, “The Journey.” I made new friends from all over the world that stumbled upon my blog and contacted me. My confidence in my writing skills have soared somewhat and I am seriously considering writing that book.

Upon my arrival home, I stepped over to the computer to begin writing the stories of those precious people I had met and how they arrived at Happiness Home, the shelter for people with HIV/AIDS. Not only did I meet them and see their faces, I now knew their names and was tasked with writing their personal journey stories.

By Bob Whetstone, AHF board member

Not all journeys are measured in miles; some may be short on distance but long on experience as evidenced by the great early 20th century migration of East Alabama dirt farmers from their cotton fields into the towns where cotton mills promised secure wages. This is one journey story that has strangely slipped through the cracks of recorded history. Beleaguered crops suffering from searing droughts, boll weevil infestation and poor soil management, leave the tenant farmers and small landowners no choice. They bundle a few possessions and their families in wagons and move into mill-owned houses. Though the work is demanding, these former farmhands collect regular wages for their dime-an-hour labor.

In the 1920s, my own grandfather packs his wife, nine children and sparse household goods in a wagon and drives his mule the short distance from Cow Pens to a mill village near Alexander City. The following passage from my novel Grave Dancin’ (published by Lulu Press, 2008) describes the family’s bold journey as they emerge from generations of farming and enter the industrial revolution of the New South:

(Obie, the eldest son, narrates what happens the day after his father announces they will all vacate the tenant farm immediately.)

“The next day I fetched the mule from the barn and led it to the wagon shed. Untangling the traces, I looked down at the borrowed house that had sheltered our family for five years, a curiously constructed two-piece shack of weathered pine pieced together with pegs and nails squatting on low pillars of stacked sandstone. It was about as crude a coat of protection against the elements as our family could ever wear. I looked forward to moving into a neatly painted house in town protected by shade trees with a front porch and a swing hanging from a large oak limb. I led the mule down to the wagon, hitched it and called out to everybody to load up. Our new house was waiting and I was in a hurry to get on the road. I laid a board across the sides of the wagon where I could sit and drive the mule. After loading the wagon with sheets, quilts, clothes and a mattress, we lifted the young’uns up to my stepmother, Desser. A few pots and pans were stuffed behind the dry goods along with sacks of canned fruits, vegetables and jelly.

After boosting Annie Bea and Heddie up, I turned to help Christine and Mamie. They backed away, refusing to ride on the wagon. Christine lifted her head high and declared, ‘I’m walking with my head high and eyes open, not that I’m ever coming back here, ever!’

I loosened the reins. The mule strained to pull the wagon up the rise. Christine and Mamie trailed behind singing, but the clatter of the wagon covered their words. Daddy marched in front of the mule like a proud Andrew Jackson leading his battle-scarred troops to glory land.”

My sharecropper grandfather’s decision to embark on that journey altered significantly the paths of his sparsely educated offspring. Unbeknownst to him at the time, this new environment would ultimately lead to more promising futures for his children and grandchildren than they could have ever imagined—steady work, better schools, wholesome leisure activities and an ever-expanding bounty of opportunities.

My family’s experience represents only one of thousands of “Journey Stories” that comprise a tapestry of the colorful, complex history of this great nation. Many similar stories highlight a special traveling exhibit compiled by the Smithsonian Institution and sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Foundation. The Museum on Main Street exhibition “Journey Stories” opens at the Bankhead House and Heritage Center in Jasper, June 25, for six weeks, and then opens in Alexander City on August 10. Visit www.ahf.net for more details.

By Bob Stewart, AHF executive director

Compared to railroads, riverboats and covered wagons, hitchhiking doesn’t hold a lofty place in America’s transportation history. But there’s no doubt of its place in popular culture. Think of Jack Kerouac (On the Road), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), and Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions), to name just three writers who have included hitchhiking in their classic works. Science fiction writers have even described interstellar hitchhiking (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and inter-dimensional hitchhiking (Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice). Add to these literary works the many references to hitchhiking in music and film, and it’s safe to say that the lone traveler thumbing a ride on an interstate ramp or a dusty two-lane highway will remain an icon of the American imagination.

Fortunately for my generation, the golden age of hitchhiking on a mass scale occurred when some of us needed it most—the 1960s and early 1970s. Not that we were penniless or homeless. But in much of the country, hitchhiking was simply an accepted mode of travel without having to invest in a personal vehicle. Until I bought my first car in 1974, I relied on the outstretched thumb for a good part of my travels and transportation during my first two years of college. In the Five College area of Massachusetts (Amherst-Hampshire-Mount Holyoke-Smith-UMass), a reliable, free bus system allowed you to easily move around from campus to campus for classes, parties, etc. But the area was also filled with students and “townies” offering equally reliable, free—and safe—rides for the asking. You could stand outside my fraternity house on Route 9 and catch a lift to virtually any local community, and even farther destinations such as New York and Boston, as quickly as you could catch a bus. So everybody hitched, even women.

Some of my most memorable hitchhikes included:
• A series of rides with my fellow Alabamian, Rik Williams, to the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire during our first Thanksgiving break. One ride was in the back of a pickup during a driving snowfall.
• Standing alone with my thumb out on I-95 in the notorious South Bronx area of NYC. That I jumped into the cab of a semi shows how desperate I was to get off that stretch of highway.
• A college chum and I being picked up on the Bessemer Superhighway by another friend’s mother and sister after hitchhiking from Nashville (having already bummed a nonstop ride from Massachusetts to the Music City). They were so shocked to see us on the side of the road that they actually stopped and took us to Tuscaloosa! We were undoubtedly the first and last hitchhikers that either of them ever picked up!

After I acquired my own automobile, I regularly returned the favor by picking up hitchhikers myself. I even gave a ride to three total strangers from Boston to San Francisco—and back for another one.

There must be an “invincibility delusion” gene among 21-year-old males, which leads them to not think twice about catching a ride from a bearded guy in a baseball cap driving a Peterbilt—or eagerly stopping for him when he’s the one with his thumb out. That gene became dormant in the late 1970s after a few well-publicized killings of and by hitchhikers. Young male and female hitchhikers finally bought cars, got married and began raising children for whom hitchhiking was absolutely verboten—even if it meant buying them their own cars. (Perhaps the invincibility delusion gene has reemerged in recent years with the explosion of extreme sports.)

According to British sociologists Graeme Chesters and David Smith in a 2001 paper, “The Neglected Art of Hitch-hiking: Risk, Trust and Sustainability,” (http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/chesters.html), hitchhiking isn’t likely to return on a widespread scale, despite nostalgia, charity, and young people’s passion for adventure and the environment. Most folks view the risk as too high, and they have a greater variety of transportation options anyway. Those occasional souls on the side of the road with a handmade sign reading “New Orleans” or “need food and a ride” aren’t your father’s hitchhikers. Give them a couple of dollars, but let them catch a lift with another Good Samaritan besides you. Nor would I advise hitchhiking as an efficient method of, say, getting to that important business meeting in Atlanta. Amtrak—or even a bicycle—might be faster.