Seein’ the USA

I spent much of July 1970 on the road, and that road was mostly I-80. The 2,900-mile interstate is your basic straight-shot highway between Teaneck, N.J., and San Francisco.

When I left my hometown of Springfield, Mass., my first stop was New York City, the South Bronx specifically. I had met a young woman in Boston while on leave in the spring and that’s where she lived.

I originally intended just to spend one night visiting, so I parked my car outside her apartment building and left all my stuff in the car. Well, you know how these things go. One night changed to two nights, maybe more, and my attention wasn’t on my parked car.

The South Bronx in 1970 was at the beginning of a terrible decade, but was already a tough place. On the second morning of my stay, I was greeted with “Hey Bill, your car got broken into.”

Nothing was broken, but stuff had been stolen. The most significant item taken was my slide projector and, more importantly still, a carousel containing 140 of the best slides from my WESTPAC deployment on USS Biddle (DLG-34). I made it a habit to take several pictures of things, but quite a few shots were singular.

Heading westward with a heavy heart, for a couple of reasons, I was on my way to Chicago, to see another young woman. I had met her while still in college in Boston and had visited her previously in the summer of 1968, before entering OCS.

We had corresponded during the interim, but she was still in college and had connected with a classmate. So I had my first experience as the proverbial “third wheel.” My stay in Chicago was relatively brief.

Leaving Chicago and heading west meant I was seeing much of the country for the first time. Biddle‘s stop in San Francisco in December 1969 had been my first visit to California, but that was a very brief and limited exposure.

My first day out of Chicago, I crossed the Mississippi River, leaving Illinois and entering Iowa.

The Midwest is big . . . and most often flat. Here’s a gallery.

This shot from somewhere in Nebraska was more amusing than daunting, though the skies portend a storm. And storms on the prairies can be really awesome.

At some point in Nebraska, the interstate runs straight for 72 miles, with a variation of only a degree or two. It’s the longest such straight stretch of highway in the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system.

Interstate 80 wasn’t completed until 1986, so there were quite a few segments of the “highway” in 1970 that was essentially a two-lane road. It was my first experience approaching 18-wheelers, each of us going 70+ miles an hour, with just a white line dividing us, and bracing for the shock wave when we passed. Not fun.

I traveled in big bunches on that trip, usually driving 12 or more hours a day. I stopped mostly at fast food establishments and brought my meals with me.

I may have stayed for the first time since Chicago in the Cheyenne, Wyo., area.

Wyoming was fascinating to me. If the Midwest was big and flat, it was also green, something I was used to. Wyoming started to look like “the West” and I was starting to see the Rockies. Another gallery.

The highest elevation I reached on this trip was Sherman Summit in Wyoming, 8,640 feet. In fact, that was likely the highest elevation I had ever been on the earth’s surface.

I then drove through the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah and drove on to Elko, Nev., where I spent the night.

Straight shot to San Francisco, through the Sierra Nevada and Donner Pass (7,000 feet elevation), passing by Donner Lake. Here are a few views of the Sierra and Donner Lake.

Headed directly to North Beach, where I snared a motel room and revisited some of the sites of refined entertainment I had first patronized that past December.

The final leg of the trip was directly south, along the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), more prosaically titled California State Route 1. It’s about 650 miles from San Francisco to San Diego. The marine layer was quite in evidence that day.

Through Big Sur, the road hugs the coastline with sharp drop-offs. It’s only two-lane. Heading south, I was on the ocean side of the road and I remember being surprised by how little of the roadside contained barriers. There were occasionally relatively small rocks with splashes of reflective paint, but that was about it.

On at least a few occasions that trip, I remember approaching a turn to the left, when you couldn’t see traffic traveling north until right into the curve, and then having to veer suddenly to the right, toward that precipitous drop-off, as a motor home or pickup with a trailer swung a little wide into my lane. I became much more cautious after the first one of those.

I’m pretty sure I made the trip in a single day, but I may have stopped for the night in the San Luis Obispo area. A gallery of PCH.

As evidenced by my choice not to stay on base while in training in Norfolk in early 1969, I seemed to have an aversion to living on base. I guess I preferred just to work there.

Thus, on my arrival in Coronado (and my first trip across the year-old and very impressive San Diego-Coronado Bridge), I got a room at the Glorietta Bay Inn, across the street from the Hotel del Coronado, and maybe half a mile from the Naval Amphibious Base (NAB) Coronado.

On 24 July 1970, 50 years ago, I reported for duty here.