A Great Trip

There's my dad, a freshman in college, just a couple of years older than his age in the story he recounts below. I heard this story many times, and I'm sure my brothers did, too. Each retelling would focus on whatever element he hoped would convey the import of the lesson he was trying to pass along. My father never offered unsolicited advice--he believed in the power of anecdotal evidence. He also believed that while he often knew what was best for us, we'd ultimately have to figure it out for ourselves...which we sometimes do.

A Great Trip, by Traug Keller

It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could do on short notice, I’d told my wife Terry later.

The six of them were sitting around the dinner table after one of Terry’s great meals –the Kennedys and the Johnsons, and they got to talking about great trips they’d taken. Each one was better than the one before it. The Kennedys talked about their long-ago honeymoon cruise to the Greek Islands, the Johnson’s had a great story to tell about their Alaska cruise and his wife topped them all with her account of a solo trip she’d made recently to some Eastern European countries. She’d gone by herself, because I wasn’t doing much traveling these days because of some health problems and she was born with the traveling bug. Not that it bothered me, I’ve done enough traveling and there wasn’t any way I could keep up with the rigorous pace Terry sets on these trips. So I begged off.

But Tom Kennedy kept poking away and stressing the fact that it didn’t have to be recent, just the best ever. So I started in and as I told my wife later, I just got carried away as one thing led to another.

“Long time ago and nothing like your trips,” I said, “but I certainly do remember it well.”

“It was back in the late Forties, maybe even 1950. It was the summer before my junior year in high school. Farley Gallagher and I were hanging around Rosine McLaughlin’s house one warm evening. We were sitting on the front porch, trying to win Rosine’s favor, both of us no doubt, while we groused about not being able to find a job for the summer. The economy had slowed just a touch that year after the breakneck pace of the years right after the war.

We were probably talking a little loudly, each of us trying to look like the sharper go-getter in Rosine’s eyes, I guess. Then this fellow from next door pops onto the porch and Rosine introduces him as Mr. Carlson who owned a paint factory on the east side of town. He said he’d heard us talking about having trouble finding a job and he’d come over to see if we might like to work for him that summer mixing paint.

“Well, we’ve never mixed paint before but we’re quick learners,” Farley told him and I jumped in to let him know that we were both taking the Classical Course at the Jesuit high school and, hey, if you can learn Greek, you can learn to mix paint. I guess we impressed him with our credentials and we agreed that $1.50 an hour would be fine and arranged to meet him at his plant on E.55^th St. the next morning at 7:30 to start mixing paint.

Oh boy. Did we mix paint! The way it worked was you would sit on a 50 gallon can of paint and pull another 50 gallon can in front of you, uncap the can, plunge your mixer in and start turning, 100 turns of the paddle per can to make sure each was thoroughly mixed . When you were finished you cleaned your paddle and pulled over another 50 gallon can. The cans were on an assembly line that looked like it went out the door and all the way across Lake Erie. We shared mixing duties with two other fellows from 55^th St., neither of whom were studying Greek.

Farley and I lasted to the middle of August. Sitting across from each other mixing paint we’d cooked up a plan to take a driving trip after we’d accumulated enough money. Farley said his dad, who was a big deal doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, had agreed to let Farley use his Buick for the trip. He had another car, Farley told me. He even gave us some travel material about Maine and one of the things we learned was that if you hiked to the top of Mt. Cadillac you could be the first in the entire country to see the sun rise. Wow. We decided to do that.

We got side tracked the first day out in New Hampshire when we saw a sign for a State Fair. At the Fair we saw a tent with a barker in front urging passers by to see “the lovely Bonnie Ray in all her glory.” Farley said that meant she was naked and we ought to go in. The barker wouldn’t let us in, claiming we were too young so we waited till he got involved with someone and we snuck past him. Sure enough, there was a naked girl doing a dance on the stage. It stopped both of us cold. She was this incredible alabaster statue come to life, just the slightest sheen of perspiration on her skin. Blond hair just right. Neither Farley nor I could take our eyes off her. She did this exotic dance—at least this product of an all male Jesuit education and prudish parents—thought it was exotic and I know Farley did too, but he wouldn’t admit it because after all he was a Senior and I was only a Junior.

She finished, we stumbled out, the barker screamed at us, we ran for the car. We tore out of there. We’d have to step on it if we were going make it up Mt. Cadillac that night. We made one stop. Farley got us a six pack of Bud. He said we’d have to sleep out on the mountain that night and we’d need something. He also bought a box of animal crackers.

We found a road that took us half way up the mountain, parked the car and hiked. We both were wearing loafers and I was getting a little nervous about just having a polo shirt on. It was getting chilly. It took us a couple of hours to make it up to a clearing where there was a sign that said “Sunrise Lookout.” There was nobody else there. It was as dark as anything I’d ever seen. The wind had picked up and was making a racket in the trees. It felt like it was getting colder by the minute.

We didn’t have a blanket, of course, so we devised a plan to sleep sitting up with our backs against each other facing in different directions. We drank the beer. It was the first time I’d ever drunk any beer outside my home and it tasted good. All night we heard animals scuffling around. Farley said it was squirrels; I wasn’t so sure, given his track record so far. We didn’t sleep much but morning finally came; clouds covered the sky, horizon to horizon. No sunrise that we could see. We hiked back down to the car.

Farley and I kept going following our original plan of going down along the coast and spending a couple of days at Old Orchard Beach. We saw a lot of girls there and we drank some more beer. Somehow, though, we’d lost our edge. I never figured out why—was it the sight of that alabaster vision or the climb up Mt. Cadillac? I never have figured it out.

Last week I had an e-mail from my sister Barbara in Cleveland telling me that Farley Gallagher’s obituary was in the paper that day. He’d suffered a massive heart attack according to his wife Rosine. Barbara wanted me to know because she thought I’d remember him.

Nobody said anything after I finished, and the evening just kind of wound down.