Pull over!

I need to pee

I just finished reading Unstuck by Stephanie Stuckey. It recounts her experience taking control of the company her grandfather had started, first making pecan treats and evolving to running roadside stores and filling stations across the country. They began in the pre-interstate days of road trips, offering souvenirs and snacks (as well as restrooms and fuel). Offering a break from seat-bouncing, are-we-there-yet kids, or just a cup of coffee and a respite for any tired motorist.

I last stopped at a Stuckeys a couple years back, on the Delmarva peninsula. Heading north after crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which scares the hell out of me. I had a sandwich.

It’s the kind of place I *will* pull over. I am that driver. Ice cream? yes. Coffee kiosk? Don’t mind if I do. Was that a Krispy Kreme sign? Hold on, I’m making a u-turn. When I saw the Stuckey’s sign, we were stopping.

I’ve also always been about the roadside kitch. Stopping to look at the Giant Whatever. I sometimes feel like I’m the last person on earth who buys postcards.

Some of you will recall the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which one of the pageant entrants celebrates the giant roadside ball of twine…

This kind of roadside attraction, like the filling station, the souvenir stand, various other pull-over opportunities, emerged with the arrival of the car.

Train travel had brought some attractions at stations, such as the Harvey House dining rooms designed to cater to hungry rail passengers (before there was much in the way of a dining car on board).

Before that, when long distance travel was often by stage coach, there were coaching stations, inns, where passengers could stop - and wait for the next service, or make arrangements to get to their destination. These places didn’t have to be good, or do anything much to “attract” guests. People arriving on the stagecoach didn’t have a great range of options.

But car travel was different. Not only could people travel faster, they could choose where to stop. Suddenly a lot more places had the chance to play up their tourism opportunities (and of course, anywhere with not much doing can sell itself as the “gateway” to somewhere else). The owners of houses or farms that found themselves suddenly on a much-more-beaten path than before often got enterprising, and opened their front window to offer refreshments.

Soon small establishments sprung up, like the one in James Crain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). The protagonist, a drifter, arrives there by chance, after he gets kicked off the truck he snuck onto in Tijuana.

“That was when I hit this Twin Oaks Tavern. It was nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California. There was a lunchroom part, and over that a house part, where they lived, and off to one side a filling station, and out back a half dozen shacks that they called an auto court”.

He was describing the kind of place that would have been familiar to readers. (At the time he was writing, two-thirds of all households had a car).

The industry of roadside attractions had its heyday by midcentury, but dropped off with the arrival of bigger highways, often cutting past those older routes. Cars became more reliable (people didn’t need to pull in and find a mechanic so often). Longer road trips were also taken over by flights.

The services available today tend to be chain-run and generic. (For example, the Irish firm, Applegreen, is now a major provider of filling stations and road stops in multiple countries). Quirky and local don’t happen.

And nobody is building things like this anymore!

It’s a shame. We have the mass-produced and interchangeable, rather than the local and distinct. I think that makes our travel all the poorer.

Where else I’ve been:

I reviewed All That Glitters for the WSJ, and wrote about patent leather and the history of cricket in the US and Canada for JSTOR Daily.