Not-That-Easy Rider

We're Hitting the Road, Jack: A diner actually in California (near L.A.)--but not the typical train car style.

In his timeless classic The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck chronicles the migration of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California as they journey along Highway 66 in a converted Hudson truck. Early into the expedition, the family begins noticing hundreds of other families all headed in the same direction, driving West with trucks filled with people and no home left behind. Certain aspects of the trip—the used cars, the diners—are common to all travelers, and in order to better understand their migration, I thought I would research these typical characteristics. Here’s a good road trip song to set the mood.

Al Joad’s insistent confidence in his choice of car for the Joad family piqued my interest, and I decided to investigate whether the rascal was just a smart aleck (as Pa claims), or was, in fact, smart. In 1929 the Hudson Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, announced its new model, the Dover truck. I am assuming this is the type of truck the Joads bought, although I don’t know much about old cars and can’t be sure. My initial research yielded some promising stats: the United States Postal Service was the biggest fan, and used some of the trucks into the 1950s, although the model was discontinued in the early 1930s. Though the Dover is hard to come by nowadays, Hostetler's Hudson Museum in Shipshewana, Indiana still has one of the restored mail trucks. A company of the people, the Hudson Motor Car Co. was founded on the business plan of selling cars to Americans for less than a grand. They were also dedicated to keeping people safe, and were the first in the auto industry to develop dual brakes.

After inching along in a converted Hudson truck at thirty-five mph for days, one is sure to get hungry for something besides salted pork. Thank goodness for diners! They date back to 1858 when a 17-year-old kid named Walter Scott decided to make a little extra cash by selling sandwiches and coffee to newspapermen working at night. By 1872 Walter quit the paper and stayed outside in his covered wagon all night selling sustenance to the haggard journalists of the Providence Journal. Apparently old railroad cars and trolleys used to be converted to diners by entrepreneurs who couldn’t afford to build a structure, and from this—the phrase “dining car”—comes the name we all know and love—diner. Though diners were able to stay in business through the Depression (thanks to those reliable truck drivers), many diner builders were put out of business because internal combustion buses replaced street trolleys in the 1930s and 1940s, providing plenty of old trolley cars to convert into diners.

My research provided me with interesting facts and great background information about some aspects of the Joads’ lives on the road. But Steinbeck’s incredible attention to detail more than accounts for any forgotten history on the part of the reader. He writes like a scientist, using his pen as a microscope or a scalpel to delicately deconstruct or investigate the most hidden corners of his characters’ personalities. He makes the reader’s belly grow fat with Rosasharn’s baby; makes their forehead sprout wrinkles like Ma Joad; and makes their eyelids flap morosely over nothingness like the despairing car mechanic alone on the road, alone on the ominous and dusty journey.