Cover Image: After Ike

After Ike

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Member Reviews

I enjoyed reading this road trip book. The author leaves from Washington DC and travels along The Lincoln Highway to San Francisco retracing the 1919 military convoy. I was familiar with the Lincoln Highway but not the 1919 convoy. The convoy left DC and traveled across the country to promote good road. At each stop they were met with dignitaries and ordinary citizens. Newspapers celebrated their arrival. At each stop the author includes the 1919 diary entry and the newspaper articles. He also includes his own experiences, places he visited, signs he sees and what the convoy would have seen. At the end of the book the follows up on some of the members of the convoy. The most famous being President Eisenhower. The writing and the pace as you travel is good. I enjoy what the author calls a slow travel movement, getting off the interstates and traveling along the back roads. The irony is not lost on the author that Eisenhower's highways contributed to the decline of small towns. He is hopeful that there are still people around who feel it is important to preserve history along the road and you will meet a lot of them here. Enjoy this historical and current armchair adventure.

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An Engaging Historical Travelogue

If you're going to be stuck in a car for the duration of a pokey cross-country auto trip you want to be sure your traveling companion is amiable company. I am happy to report that our author here, Michael Owen, is most congenial, interesting and well balanced. We learn a good deal about the Lincoln Highway and America just after World War I, and there's not even a hint of any marital problems, mommy issues, or existential angst. We don't eat, pray, or love, and we even tread lightly in the irony department.

Being based in Colorado I've found and read a fair number of old memoirs about experiences while driving Model T's through the mountains or taking the old Packard into the San Juans or off to Santa Fe. The best of those books almost always feature plucky adventurers who have a knack for romanticizing cold winds, leaky roofs, and broken axles. Well, our modern author is only recreating a famous cross-country trek, but he does so with enough imagination, flair and spirit that it feels like he would have been just fine had he been on the original trip.

We start in D.C. and end up in San Francisco. The idea was to follow the route of the famous 1919 military convoy, which basically means following the original Lincoln Highway as closely as possible. Lots of the fun of this book is in leaving the modern routes and finding the abandoned tracks, lanes, and wagon paths that constituted the original 1919 road. In doing this we get all of the local color and history any reasonable armchair time-traveler could possibly hope for. There are a few photos here and there, but regrettably there is no map. Owen is especially skilled at mixing in history, observation, commentary, road wisdom, contemporaneous notes and news articles, diary entries, previous research, and the odd shaggy dog story, to keep his travel tale energetic and on the move. That is way harder than it might appear, but Owen pulls it off without ever becoming tedious or pedantic.

We never stay anywhere longer than we have to, or spend too much time listening to some fellow traveler's info dump, and once we get underway we move a lot faster than that 1919 convoy did. The Eisenhower angle, (he was part of the convoy and wrote reports and kept a journal), is interesting, adds a personal touch, and provides a nice thread that links a number of travel and highway themes.

So, a cheerful, interesting, informative, and engaging find, and a nice change of pace. (Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

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After Ike: On The Trail Of The Century-Old Journey That Changed America by Michael S. Owen From Dog Ear Publishing is everything I could ask for in a book. It's history, travel and roads. I have been fascinated by the U.S. road system since I was very young. It was President Eisenhower who put much of our system in place through the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act influenced by his journey as a young lieutenant colonel on this cross country convoy. As author Michael S. Owen covers the same route as the Army convoy did in 1919 he shares his sights and thoughts along with the history and sights the convoy would have seen. The research is meticulous, the book spellbinding for all but especially the history buff and road fanatics.
A fun look at the Lincoln Highway from two points in time 100 years apart.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

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I know some of you don’t care for non-fiction. But how about a vivid book that shows you what it was like to drive across America 100 years ago and what it would be like to do it today? Happy trails do await you with this book, subtitled “On the trail of the century-old journey that changed America.”

Near the White House is an obelisk that marks the starting point of the first transcontinental Convoy over the Lincoln Highway, July 7, 1919. Eight-one military vehicles left to drive more than 3,200 miles to San Francisco. The main purpose was to assess the feasibility of rapid cross-country transport. Another reason was to promote the new program of “Good Roads”. Now that motor vehicles were becoming a way of life, better roads were needed. The Convoy became huge national news. The Convey changed America!

Really- it was a big deal! And Author Owens brings it all to life for us. In addition to researching the events of the Convoy, he actually drove United States Highway 30 (the modern Lincoln Highway) from Washington to San Francisco. In his charming and folksy way, he shares the day-to-day news of the Convoy mixed with his own experiences on the road, 100 years later.

“The Convoy was the Apollo moon landing of 1919.” Now, here’s a fact that will fascinate you- the moon landing happened exactly 50 years after the Convoy. What a leap for Mankind!

The Convoy was big news. Every town or city along the route planned festivities to celebrate and give the soldiers a good meal and entertainment. The author describes the chicken dinners and speeches and also shares current local events.
In addition to changing America, did the trip across America change one young soldier? It well may have. Serving with the Convoy, was a young officer, Ike Eisenhower. Did his dusty and slow trip with the Convoy show him more about the America that he would serve for most of his life?

He would rise to become a five-star general in the Army and serve as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II. He would also be elected President of the United States and as President, he would oversee the development of our modern interstate highway system. But during the Convoy’s trip, he was a joker and prankster.

According to the Statistical Officer of the Convoy, the Convoy drove 3,251 miles in 62 days, or 58.1 miles per day. More than half of the mileage was over dirt roads, wheel paths, mountain trails, and alkali flats.

Each chapter of the book covers one state of the trip, from Pennsylvania to Ohio (where I live, 30 miles from the Lincoln Highway) and other mid-western states to Iowa and Nebraska, then the western states, and finally to Nevada and California. The author gives us a true feeling of each town he passes through, sharing the little cafes and bars, the museums and tourist sites. Americana- “You know you’re in a small town when you hear a dog barking and know whose it is.”

I enjoyed reading about events that were made possible by the automobile, such as a 300-mile garage sale, drive-in movie theatres and eateries, bank robbers and get-away-cars, billboards, and bumper stickers. The book is a pleasure to read.

So, why not be a Slow Traveler? Check out the Lincoln Highway Association website. Skip the interstates and try the backroads and have fun discovering America! How else will you get to see the Barbed Wire Capital of the World, or the Wall Paper Capital of the World? And you wouldn’t want to miss the World’s Largest Frying Pan, or CarHenge. But most of all, don’t miss reading this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dog Ear Publishing for a digital review copy. This is my honest review.

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