Don't Make Me Pull Over!

"Smooth prose that entertains and enlightens . . . For anyone who has ever been on a road trip, or is planning to take one, this book is a must read."
—Michael Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road and The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate

Auteur

Richard Ratay was the last of four kids raised by two mostly attentive parents in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in journalism and has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for twenty-five years. Ratay lives in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, with his wife, Terri, their two sons, and two very excitable rescue dogs.

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“A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane” (Kirkus Reviews), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips—before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps.

The birth of America’s first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming—sans seatbelts!—to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them—from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.

Now, decades later, Ratay offers “an amiable guide…fun and informative” (New York Newsday) that “goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer’s day” (The Wall Street Journal). In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot “land yachts,” oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes,” “Smokey”-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio.

An “informative, often hilarious family narrative [that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips” (Publishers Weekly), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together—for better and worse—have largely disappeared.

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Don’t Make Me Pull Over!

CHAPTER 1

Swerving through the Seventies

A Family Boldly Leaves Its Driveway

One winter evening in 1976, when I was seven years old, I went to sleep in my bed in Wisconsin and woke up in a snowdrift in Indiana. I had little idea how I’d gotten there.

I dimly recall my father’s arms cradling me as I looked up through eyelids heavy with sleep. I watched the white ceiling of the hallway turn into the shadowy pine rafters of our garage, then the fuzzy tan fabric of our family car’s interior. I remember being tossed across the laps of my older brothers in the backseat, a pillow pushed under my head, and a blanket thrown over my body. Then I drifted off again into blackness.

Next came a startled yelp. I opened my eyes to find myself tumbling in a blur of stuffed animals, eight-track tape cartridges, Styrofoam coffee cups, and issues of Dynamite magazine. I landed on the car’s floor with a thud, the round hump of the transmission housing pressed into my belly, my chin burning from sliding on the shag carpet.

I had no idea where we were. But I knew where we weren’t—anywhere near the sunny beach in Florida that I’d been listening to my mom tell us about for weeks. All I could surmise was that I was in our car and it was cold and dark and eerily quiet. Even the engine was still. Finally, my dad’s voice cut the silence.

“Jeez, Louise! Everyone okay? Anyone hurt?” my dad asked, his head swiveling around from my mom and sister beside him in the front seat to my brothers and me in the rear.

“Wha-what happened?” my mom replied, dazed. Like me, she’d just been roused from a deep sleep to find herself on a whirling carnival ride.

“Whoa! We did at least three three-sixties!” gushed my thirteen-year-old brother, Bruce, a little too enthusiastically for the rest of us.

“The highway just became a hockey rink!” my dad explained. “Cars spinning everywhere! It’s a wonder we didn’t smack into anyone!”

My twelve-year-old sister, Leslie, who got motion sickness from riding escalators at the mall, didn’t say a word. She just stared straight ahead in her usual position between my parents in the front seat, trying not to barf all over the dashboard.

After counting heads to make sure none of us had been launched into orbit, my parents quickly assessed our situation. The car was upright, though pitched at an unnerving angle. Good. No one had any obvious fractures or gushing head wounds. Good. Not a single window showed a crack. Also good. The worst that could be said was that all of the loose contents inside our car—maps, Thermoses, shoes, me—were scattered about as though our vehicle had been picked up and shaken like a snow globe. But then that was how the inside of our car generally looked while on a road trip anyway. What was unusual was how dark it was. The only light inside our car streamed in shafts through gaps of thick snow caked on every window.

Dad turned the ignition key. To our surprise, the engine roared to life, pressing the windshield wipers suddenly back into action. As they labored to push the clumps of snow aside, we got a better view of our predicament. Our car had come to rest well off the interstate, halfway down a broad slope that served as one side of a wide V-shaped highway median. Since I was only seven years old, I didn’t dwell on the delicate nature of our predicament; instead, I thought about what a great sledding hill this would make—had we been on Dad’s prized wood toboggan and not inside our 1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car. We weren’t alone. As far as we could see, ahead of us and behind, vehicles were scattered about the interstate like toy cars dropped by a cranky toddler.

Dad pulled his door handle, allowing a ferocious blast of frigid air to swirl inside. The door barely budged, blocked by a mound of thigh-high snow outside. Dad’s blood pressure instantly redlined. “Cripes Jiminy!” It was one of many colorfully benign phrases he kept ready to avoid blurting out a real ear burner in front of us kids. Others included: “Gee willikers!” “For crying out loud!” and his ever reliable go-to nonexpletive, “Criminently!” That they made no sense wasn’t important. It was enough that they kept him out of the doghouse with my mom and the Catholic Church.

Dad slammed the door back and forth against the snowdrift like a battering ram. This took no small effort. The door of a mid-seventies Lincoln was only a slightly smaller version of the one guarding the entrance to a NORAD command bunker. Eventually he cleared enough space to slip outside, and my mom turned off the engine.

“There’s no sense wasting gas,” she said. “We may be here a while, and we’ll need the heater.” My mother was nothing if not practical. “Now did any of you happen to pack candy bars or anything else to eat?”

We hadn’t been stuck in the ditch five minutes, and my mom was…