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chicken or both), Alma, Mt. Pleasant, Clare and Hough- ton Lake. Each of these was an eagerly anticipated milestone, one more step on the long trek north.
If we left in the evening, the old man, as he was affectionately referred to (although we always addressed him in person as “Pop”) would drive until after dark. My mother would start searching for a motel with an orange neon “vacancy” sign at which we might spend the night. In those days, the motor lodges or motor hotels (or ‘motels’) usually consisted of small, separate cabins rather than long one or two-story cement block build- ings. They were mom and pop operations in which one could never be too sure that the sheets had been laun- dered, the toilet scrubbed, or the premises free of vermin. Mother always asked to inspect the room before registering. On more than one occasion she came back to the car shaking her head, no, and we motored on to the next place that had a vacancy sign. Since we never started looking until well after dark, the better places were often already filled. It was therefore preferable, rather than leaving late in the day, to get up at 5 AM and make an early start, making the trip in one long day.
During World War II, no new refrigerators were manufactured, which meant that my father, who was too old to enlist, had a lot of work to do fixing the old ones. As a result, my parents had been able to buy a new Cadil- lac sedan, which we used to drive north. My older brother and I, if left to our own devices in the back seat, would invariably get into fights, so our grandmother was strategically seated in the middle of the back seat to keep us separated. We played hangman, looked for the Burma-Shave signs to read out loud, and tried to be the first to identify landmarks and tourist traps like the Call of the Wild Museum along the way. After the Mackinac Bridge was built, one of us always wanted to be the first to shout, “I see the bridge” as the towers emerged on the horizon not too long after we passed the giant clam sign at Sea Shell City.
If we left home about 6 AM for the 500-mile trip, the rising sun would soon begin to shine through the back window of the car. We turned the radio on to WGAR, 1420 AM, to listen to the Breakfast Club with Don McNeil, which was broadcast each morning from Chicago for over 30 years on ABC radio. That program was followed by shows hosted by Arthur Godfrey, whose daily greeting was “howahya, howahya,” followed by Gary Moore. By the time those shows were over, we were well into Michigan. A major milestone along the way was always the broad Maumee River, whose deep gorge and wide expanse seemed much more impressive than the narrow, meandering Cuyahoga River, which bisected the low-lying industrial heart of Cleveland. The next major milestone was Devil’s Lake, for no good reason aside from the name, which engendered images of dark, evil things. It was a blue-collar resort area, with many small
motels, and I seem to remember this was one of the places where we would look for a motel room on those occasions when we started the trip at night. I don’t remember any of the accommodations there ever being acceptable.
Our 1947 Cadillac was a nice car, but it didn’t have a lot of trunk space. If we needed to take anything extra, it had to go on top or behind. We made one trip with a small trailer behind the car, hauling some things that wouldn’t fit in the trunk or go on top. My father had borrowed the trailer from a buddy – there was no U-Haul in those days. The trailer was pretty rickety. It may have been OK for going around town, but it definitely was not roadworthy at high speeds. We blew a tire on the trailer about halfway north, which led to some considerable delay and some well-deserved spousal criticism. I don’t remember how the tire got fixed. At least the trailer didn’t flip and destroy all its contents. Putting things on top wasn’t necessarily any safer, because there was no good way to secure anything there. On another occasion a couple of suitcases went flying off the roof of the car, hit the ground bounced and opened, scattering my grandmother’s clothes along the side of the road. I haven’t trusted trailers or luggage racks since.
As you travel north through Michigan on route 27, the land rises slowly until you reach an undulating, forested plateau, three-quarters of the way to the Straits of Mackinac, with an elevation of 1,175 feet above sea level, 600 feet above that of lakes Michigan and Huron. Here the highway passed just west of two large lakes, named Houghton and Higgins after important men in Michigan history. It has always been something of a mystery to me how two large lakes came to be formed on the highest elevation in the lower half of the state, but there they are. Route 27 continued north past the old Army reserve training camp at Grayling, through town of Gaylord, and on to Cheboygan on the shore of Lake Huron 20 miles east of the Straits. There it ends at its junction with route 23, 18 miles from Mackinaw City. It was at this point in the trip that we began to think about how long we would have to wait for the ferry boat that took cars across the Straits of Mackinac from the Lower to the Upper Penin- sula. At peak travel times, for example just before hunting season, cars on the way to Mackinaw City could be backed up for miles on Route 23.
In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, before the Mackinac Bridge was opened in November, 1957, cars were directed onto large parking lots in Mackinaw City where, in long lines they waited their turn to embark on one of the eight ferry boats that made the 5-mile trip between Mackinaw City and St. Ignace. Waits of 1to 4 hours were not unusual. The boats were huge, coal-fired steel-hulled vessels that held cars parked 4 or 5 across on their lowest deck. Attendants waving their arms hurried drivers to pull in quickly and park bumper to bumper.
16 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN FALL 2021