Before there were Google Maps, before there was MapQuest, there was something my daughters called “GrannieQuest.”
GrannieQuest was a remarkable, personalized navigation service. If you were driving somewhere, you would call my mother and ask for directions. You would quickly get accurate, detailed directions (told from memory) even if it had been years since my mother had been where you were going. Moreover, the directions came with recommendations for where to eat or buy food, alternate routes in case you ran into traffic, and a variety of good places to stop. If you were lucky, you also got a story about a family misadventure that had occurred somewhere on the route, and if you were really lucky, it would be a story you hadn’t heard dozens of times before.
While my mother’s memory for roads and routes was impeccable, she also loved to get TripTiks, personalized route maps from the American Automobile Association (AAA), an organization honored in today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued on March 4, 1952, to mark the 50th anniversary of AAA’s founding in Chicago in 1902.
I think my mother used AAA’s TripTiks to map out the routes she and my father would take when he did one of his regular speaking tours for the American Chemical Society, which brought him through much of America’s heartland. The TripTiks appealed to her, I think, because they not only provided suggestions on which routes to take, where to eat, and where to stay but also where to stop along the way.
The last item was important because my parents loved to find obscure museums, strange stores, fun restaurants, and, especially people selling all sorts of “art” and “crafts.” They bought things at all those places and kept adding them to their already full homes.
I grew up thinking that it was normal to have a house packed with such stuff. But I learned that others thought it was a bit odd. In the summer of 1978, for example, George Moffley and I were painting houses in Middletown, CT. When we hit a stretch of rain, we drove to New Jersey to paint the inside of my parents’ house while they were away (perhaps on road trip using a TripTik). This meant we had to (a) take everything off the walls and (b) put everything back. George found this process so overwhelming that by the third day, he was walking around half mumbling, half singing “knick, knickknack, knick, knickknack” as we put stuff back.
My mother also liked the TripTiks in the way that she liked all of the little odds and ends that went with travelling. Like many people’s parents, she loved to take the little bars of soap and shampoo from hotel rooms. She also kept dozens (perhaps hundreds) of the blue plastic folders you got when you bought traveler’s checks, which she always did. I think she also held onto dozens of lanyards and plastic badge holders from the many conferences my father attended. When asked about any of this, she would just smile in her unique way, chuckle, and say “I didn’t want the hoarders to get them.”
Looking at today’s stamp – which was designed by Charles R. Chickering, a legendary designer who was responsible for over 70 different mid-20th century stamps—I’m also struck by the pure 1950s essence of the image: a young male adolescent crossing guard protecting two young girls from stepping into the road. The picture on the first-day envelope that accompanies this stamp in my father’s albums also is a mid-century classic.
I find the image particularly striking because when this stamp came out, my mother was pregnant with my brother Neil, who was born in June 1952. I believe that the image of the boy was, in some way, a big part of what my parents had in mind when they thought of what their son would be like. (And the image of the girls probably wasn’t far from what they had in mind for my sister Nancy, who was born 19 months later, in December 1953.)
In many ways, the pictures I’ve seen of Neil and Nancy from the 1950s and early 1960 aren’t that far from the images on the stamp. Of course the pictures from their teenage years and beyond began to look much different. It’s a bit hard, for example, to imagine that the clean-cut boy holding up traffic would became a bearded young man with long, curly hair who indulged I many of the excesses of the late 60s and early 70s.
The AAA guides – along with the Mobil Travel Guides that my parents relied on in the 1960s for guidance on which motels to stay in when we went on family vacations – promised a mild form of adventure. You could go somewhere different but do so with some assurance that someone had identified some interesting but safe places to stay, eat, and see. That must have been extraordinarily reassuring for people like my mother who not only was raised by people who weren’t far removed from Eastern Europe’s pogroms in eastern Europe, but also come of age during the Great Depression, the Nazi Holocaust, and World War II.
Maybe it also was reassuring to see images of healthy (white, middle-class) kids living in more benign times. Of course my mother’s parenting journey, like most peoples’ parenting journeys, didn’t exactly unfold the way she expected.
When I think about it that way, I have more compassion for the seemingly absurd habit of holding onto TripTiks for obscure places, as well as the small (often miniscule) hotel soap bars and shampoo bottles, the blue plastic travelers’ check envelopes and the conference lanyards. Perhaps, I think, they all promised a bit of order in an often chaotic and confusing world.
Be well, stay safe, use TripTiks to find your way, fight for justice, and work for peace.