The Golden Age of Amercian Family Vacations

Susan Sessions Rugh has written a great book about the history of the family camping or at least car driving adventure. The book is called The Golden Age of American Family Vacations and in it she captures some of what I grew up with in the 70’s the travelling of the family to the campground and prts unknown, the excitement of family vacations.

Americans have been making fun of family vacations from the time they came into style after World War II. The emergent medium of television captured some of the travails of the traveling family in late-night variety shows. Morey Amsterdam opened his show one evening in 1949 with a monologue reporting that he was just back from a vacation to Florida with his family: “I steered, my mother-in-law drove.” He commented on the expense of the vacation: “It cost us $400—a day.” It was “ten dollars for an aspirin.” He suffered the usual fate of the New York tourist in Florida when he admitted he went out on the beach and “walked away one big beautiful blister.” Morey Amsterdam’s jokes made television viewers feel better about spending the money and putting up with their families on vacation because they could laugh at themselves. Perhaps at least they recognized they weren’t alone in their stupidity!

In their comedy show on NBC television in 1952, Bob and Ray satirized the summer vacation by offering for sale a summer vacation kit “for people who want to be uncomfortable without leaving home.” It included a dozen items, among them “a bathing suit that makes you look kind of silly” and “a hard table so you feel like you have slept in a camp cot.” It came complete with a beach umbrella, along with a “handsome lifeguard to divert your wife’s attention while you are setting up the umbrella.” Finally, the sound effects man added the sounds of a day in the country: bullfrogs, owls hooting, crickets chirping, waves pounding on the beach, moose calling, the horn of a passing train sounding. Summer vacations were a lot of trouble and not really much of a vacation, but the men were caught up in this travel ritual for the sake of the family.

The family vacation parodies are based on the middle-class American vacation experience that many recognize as part of their own childhood memories. If the family vacation is such an ordeal, why do we go on vacation together? How did this madness get started? How has it changed from the days of our parents and grandparents, who stuck us in the backseat with our siblings? And why do we still spend our money and take time off work to go on vacation with our children? What does this say about us? Why do we do it?

This book is a cultural history of the American middle-class family vacation in its golden age. The era began as World War II ended in 1945, when family vacations became an established summer tradition, and lasted until the 1970s, when family road trips declined in popularity. Record numbers of parents loaded the luggage in the trunk of the family car, stashed the children in the backseat, and drove America’s highways together. Unprecedented prosperity and widespread vacation benefits at work meant most middle-class families could afford to vacation. Rising rates of automobile ownership and the construction of new highways facilitated the family road trip. An ideal of family togetherness in the baby boom justified spending money on a vacation.

To say the era was the golden age of family vacations does not mean to suggest a rosy-hued portrait of the past. Although it may have been the golden age for the white middle-class family on vacation, it was hardly a golden age for African American families who had to sleep in their cars after being turned away from motels that refused to rent them rooms, or for Jews who saw signs that read “Gentiles Only” or “Clientele Carefully Selected,” leading them to build their own resorts in the Catskills. Yet despite the discrimination, even these families joined the throngs on the nation’s highways in pursuit of family time together on vacation during the golden age of American family vacations.

The modern family road trip had its roots in the auto camping of the 1920s, when one young couple from New York City piled their belongings and their six-year-old (dubbed “Supercargo”) into their Ford and camped their way to San Francisco through twelve states in over thirty-seven days. In The Family Flivvers to Frisco, not much is made of the burden of traveling with a child who had a mind of his own. When they were forced by passing cars into a ditch near DeKalb, Illinois, the Supercargo “scrambled over the door and started, a small irate figure in yellow oilskins, to walk in the general direction of New York.” By the 1930s, family vacations were curtailed somewhat by the Depression, but so strong was the habit, they did not disappear. In Edward Dunn’s 1933 account of a western family vacation, Double-Crossing America by Motor, the four children were part of a traveling party of eight. As long as they stopped for their afternoon treat of ice cream, the children seem to have posed no problem at all. This family, who could afford a cross-country jaunt to Arizona for a month at a dude ranch, was far wealthier than most Americans, especially in the depths of the Depression.