In my dotage, I have developed a timidity about going places and getting back. If it is something like a football game or a concert, and I am driving, I fret about parking. If I go by taxi or bus, I worry about how to get a ride back to where I started. A few times, I have joined someone who chartered a limousine. But that goes against my Scottish nature, and I am not likely to do it.
When I lived in Chicago, going to the theater or anything else in the evening took some nervous planning. If we did not drive into the city, when did we have to leave the theater to get a taxi to the railroad station, where my wife and I could get the last train to our suburban home? After all, a taxi ride would cost more than the theater or concert ticket. And a delayed return also ran up the cost of the babysitter in several years. In Washington, we always drove from the suburbs to the Kennedy Center for symphony concerts. The problem there was bucking the homeward traffic to arrive in time to park at the Kennedy Center or in one of the nearby garages.
But all of this differs drastically from my upbringing, my casual attitude, and my innocent faith that there would some way for me to get to and from wherever I was going. Our grade school was four blocks from home. The junior and senior high schools were a mile across town. I walked or rode my bicycle, even for trips home for lunch. For evening functions, I walked with the hope that someone would give me a ride. And I peddled my bicycle 5 miles a day on my paper delivery route. So I was sturdy and very much like most of my classmates.
Traveling the 40 miles to and from my first college was accomplished mostly by hitchhiking. This was shortly after World War II, and very few of us youngsters had cars. Only a few veterans did. But many people driving those 40 miles were indulgent of college students, and I was never abandoned, not even on the day it snowed 10 inches. The woman who picked me up said that she might need my help to push her car out of a ditch if she slipped; fortunately not. My next college, the University of Missouri, was some 350 miles distant. I could find a ride from a classmate, at least to near my hometown. One night, my driver arrived in his hometown about midnight. So I slept on his couch and thumbed it home the next morning. And my third campus, the University of Wisconsin, was some 600 miles away. So I got on the train overnight to Chicago, then changed stations and trains and made the second leg the next morning. After college and my first year in the army, I hitchhiked.
Then I bought a car. It was an elderly Plymouth, a bit rusty from the rock salt spread to melt snow on Chicago streets. I needed a new muffler every spring. I had to find parking on the street, and on cold winter days, I was lucky if the car would start. But most of us carried cables and helped jump-start other cars, even for total strangers. I found it a reasonable thing to give rides to any hitchhiker who looked reasonably clean. When I got married, my wife used the rusty Plymouth to drive to her school-teaching job. But as a city girl, she was unwilling to pick up a hitchhiker and objected to my doing it when we were riding together.
By the late 1950s, the interstate highway system had begun to push its way through and between cities. That made it very difficult for hitchhikers. Illinois and some other states passed laws against thumbing for rides on interstate roads. And even if we ignored the law, it was difficult to stand somewhere so that a driver could slow down and stop to give someone a lift. One of the few times I tried, I made a sign stating where I was going. That got me a ride. But that driver was drunk, and I abandoned him at the next intersection. I was lucky once more, but by then, my innocence had disappeared, and I gave up the hope of a free ride.