Travel Stunts from Days of Yore

June 09, 2009

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

Here’s a 50th State-appropriate tidbit ganked in its entirety from The Writer’s Almanac.  I like the bit about women getting “worked up” at more than 20 mph.

It was on this day in 1909 that the first woman to drive across the United States, Alice Huyler Ramsey, left New York City for San Francisco. She was 22 years old, a housewife from Hackensack, New Jersey. Her trip got a lot of media attention. In 1909, not many women drove cars, and some doctors thought that it was dangerous for women to even ride in cars because they would get too worked up at more than 20 miles an hour. Alice Huyler Ramsey drove 3,800 miles across the country in a Maxwell 30 with three other women, but she was the only one who knew how to drive. They drove for 41 days and used 11 spare tires. She wrote a book about the trip called Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron (1961). In 2000, she was the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

This reminds me: I have never had a flat tire, and therefore never had to change one. Is it too late to learn? Can a person get through her whole life without a flat? That would be an admirable goal…