Map of Bob's journey in 1963
It was with a sense of impending doom that I left Africa over half a century ago on October 11th 1963. Yet I was comforted by the fact that the sad future, which I foresaw for that huge continent, would not hurt me personally and that two great adventures lay immediately ahead for me. Firstly, I was to spend two months traveling all over the USA. Then, at the start of 1964, I was to join an old established London law firm as a partner. I had qualified as a lawyer in London in 1959, after which I continued to work for the firm which had trained me since I was fifteen years old. I left them in the summer of 1961, when I was hired as a legal adviser by a major bank in Lagos, Nigeria. I lived and worked in Nigeria for over two years before resigning from the bank.
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| Lagos, Nigeria |
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| Apapa Port in Lagos |
During those years, the individual African lived in safety, used a reliable currency and had limited access to food, education and healthcare. He enjoyed a much lower standard of living than the Europeans working in the colony and the system was deeply racist. Yet the individual African was far better off in many ways than either before or after the colonial era, while the Europeans were blessed with a privileged lifestyle in a world that was fading away. That was because, in 1963, the colonial era was ending. Colonies were becoming independent countries and power was being turned over to local African politicians. I take no pleasure in having foreseen the lawlessness and mass murder and corruption and poverty which has plagued the continent ever since. Indeed, the disaster has been worse than I expected because of the AIDS epidemic, something I could never have foreseen.
I have since made brief business trips, to Lagos in 1970 and to Sierra Leone in 1983, and they have confirmed my view that Africa is now no place for a white man to live or to vacation. Premature self rule was forced upon the colonies by the USA, which hated colonialism and which at that time had the power to impose its will upon European countries weakened by World War II. The well intentioned naivety of the US government is responsible for the disaster that is Africa today. Sadly, the US government has learned nothing from its African mistakes, as its recent democracy building efforts in Iraq, Egypt, Gaza and Afghanistan presently demonstrate.
I had been honored in Lagos by parties with my friends and colleagues prior to my departure, including by a reception at the bank, but I was alone as the ship cast off and headed for the open sea. I therefore retreated to my cabin, which was a splendid room full of polished brass and wood. I saw Nigeria turn into a distant blur on the horizon and then thought about dinner.
As the only passenger, I was to take my place in the officers’ mess for all my meals. They seemed happy to have someone new to talk to. I was unused to the African Americans, clearly ex-military, who waited upon us, but I was impressed at how sophisticated they were, compared to the Africans with whom I had lived and worked back in Lagos.
The cargo that the vessel had loaded aboard in Lagos was agricultural. Before crossing the Atlantic Ocean, we needed to put into three other African ports in order to load similar cargo. Those ports were Takoradi in Ghana, Abidjan (the capital of the Ivory Coast) and Monrovia (the capital of Liberia).
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| Fort Orange Takoradi |
Throughout my trip, I would send postcards to my parents, (which were returned to me years later). I have kept them all and have inserted them in the appropriate places throughout this post (both front and back). The monkey (seen below) was the first one to be sent home from Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. I felt a particular affinity to him, as he reminded me of a certain family member who always seemed to have the same grumpy expression and who will remain unnamed. My parents kept a map on the wall and would insert a pin with the arrival of each card marking my many stops along the way. I've tried to duplicate that map as can be seen above.
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| Postcard of Grumpy Monkey Ivory Coast, Africa |
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| Backside of Grumpy Monkey postcard |
Abidjan was a fine French city with wide boulevards and architecture which would not have been out of place in Paris. I enjoyed visiting the city, where the Ivory Coast had just gained its independence from France. Here's the link to another post on this blog I wrote about our trip to Paris, France.
Before leaving, the French had installed its own choice as president of the new country. As an African dictator, he became a benevolent despot and ruled reasonably well for over thirty years. When it came to giving independence, the French were much smarter than the British. The French held elections while a colony was still under their control, put into office their own choice of president and left a battalion of French paratroopers to support him. On the other hand, the British simply allowed the most effective rabble rouser among the local politicians to seize power on their departure. Naturally, the former British colonies soon became politically unstable and were plagued by repeated coup d’etats and military takeovers. The former French colonies were more stable and The Ivory Coast was a good example of that.
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| Broad Street, Monrovia, Liberia |
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| Backside of Liberia postcard |
It was October 19th 1963 when the ship made its final African stop at Monrovia, Liberia. This city was a slum, compared with the rest of Africa and there was a reason for that. Liberia was almost the only part of Africa that had never been colonized by Europeans. It had been settled in 1830 by freed slaves from North America, who had already combined with the local Africans to produce the kind of corrupt and lawless hell hole that the rest of Africa would develop into over the next half century.
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| Image of President James Monroe and his doctrine |
I went ashore there very briefly and was thankful to get back on board ship. Monrovia had been named after James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States and the creator of the famous Monroe doctrine. Monroe had played a large part in setting up the new country. It took its name from the word “liberty”, which had long been absent from that country in 1963. The current president was a monster of a kind that would soon be seen in other parts of the continent. It simply happened here first.
We left Monrovia and at last I was at sea on the way to America. I saw no hurricanes and the surface of the sea was placid as I ran around the empty deck each morning. The ship docked in Savannah, Georgia on October 30th 1963, which meant that we had been at sea for 11 days.
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| Non-immigrant visa stamp in my passport |
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| Professor- Solicitor of the Supreme Court |
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| Savannah, GA |
I was the proud possessor of a $99 ticket which would allow me to travel by bus anywhere in the United States during the next 99 days. I paid no attention to Savannah, which is an old city full of Georgian architecture. I had not come to America to see what I was used to seeing in Europe. I wanted new experiences, such as seeing my first skyscraper. In 1963, the height of buildings in London was limited to 100 feet, so a skyscraper was entirely foreign to me. The rule in London was that every floor of every building should be accessible by way of a fireman’s ladder.
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| General James Oglethorpe founder of Savannah, GA |
Here's the link to my Savannah story on this blog.
I eventually found the Greyhound bus station and inspected my first Greyhound bus, equipped with something called “a restroom”. The phrase was new to me and made me giggle. At that time, the station and the bus were clean and smart, as were my fellow passengers. Towards the end of the 20th century, these stations and buses tended to attract vagrants and a generally scruffy clientele. It was certainly not like that in 1963. As I write this in the year 2017, I am pleased to see that bus travel in the US is making something of a comeback. It really is a cheap and pleasant way to travel, compared to travel by rail and air.
I hesitantly allowed the driver to take my precious suitcase and to store it in the belly of the bus. I tried out the restroom and was most impressed with its workings. I found a comfortable seat and settled back to admire the landscape of Georgia, as the bus headed inland from Savannah to Atlanta.
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| Eisenhower Interstate System |
Funding for the building of an interstate highway system had been authorized by President Eisenhower in the 1950s. It was one of the achievements of his presidency of which he was most proud.
By 1963, much of the system had been or was being built. While I was grateful that such good roads enabled me to travel over 10,000 miles around the United States within a few weeks as planned, I soon found the scenery to be rather boring. There was nothing to see. As I intended to travel hundreds of miles daily, this presented a problem. I could converse with my fellow passengers, always eager to make friends at the slightest hint of a British accent. Indeed, Americans were so kind and welcoming towards me that it was hard to remember that there was not, within a radius of thousands of miles, a single person who even knew me. Who would have helped me in an emergency? Fortunately, I never needed to discover, because I never became ill or lost my money during my travels.
Then I solved the problem of boredom. I quickly realized that these buses traveled throughout the night and that the seats on the bus were comfortable enough to sleep in. Thus, for the next few weeks, I slept at night as I traveled through such emptiness as West Texas and the cornfields of Kansas.
On the other hand, when travelling through the Rockies or the Pacific Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I made sure to travel by day and to see everything. This strategy left me with extra cash, since I had budgeted to stay in a hotel every night. I spent the extra cash by ensuring that, whenever I did sleep in a hotel, it was a really good one.
In 1963, a British pound could be exchanged for US $2.80. That was not as good as the US $4 rate that applied at the end of World War Ii, but it was a lot better than what followed. Today, the rate is around US $1.30 and falling. I had been paid in Nigeria in British pounds, so I was comfortable with my finances during my American odyssey.
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| Fly DELTA Billboard, Skyline from North Expressway, Atlanta, Georgia 1964 |
There were skyscrapers in the distance, the first that I had ever seen. We were arriving in Atlanta, then as now the premier city in the south eastern United States. Every Fortune 500 company has an office in Atlanta, which was and is that important.
Although I could not imagine it at that time, it was a city that would become hugely important in my own life. My eldest child would marry and obtain her PhD in Atlanta. My first two grandchildren would be born there. My younger children would attend high school there. I would one day have my hip replaced there, surgery unheard of in 1963. One of my children still lives there. Yet these people, as yet unborn, and this surgery as yet not perfected, were not on my mind as I scrambled off the bus and went to explore Atlanta. I went shopping and was pleased with US prices. Wages were so much higher than in Europe that I feared that prices would be higher too. They were not. Indeed, certain items such as clothing were much cheaper than in Europe.
For me, that date was set in stone and could not be altered. This meant that, if I was to see as much of America as I hoped, I could not dawdle in Atlanta or anywhere else. I had to push on, so I took the bus to Chattanooga, Tennessee. This city was little more than 100 miles northwest of Atlanta, just over the Georgia state line, and was very famous in England for a most peculiar reason.
During the dark days of World War Two, we kept our spirits up in bombed out London by singing a cheerful new song from America entitled “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”. It was performed by the Glenn Miller orchestra using its big band sound, as seen in video above. It made Chattanooga seem cool. Thus, as the bus pulled in, l felt that I was arriving at a familiar and happy place rather than at a strange city.
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| Hotel Patten |
I became even more at home, when I saw that the skyline was
dominated by a high rise building topped with the letters “Hotel Patten”. Could I get a free room there by claiming to
be the owner’s long lost cousin from England?
I had already decided that Americans were much more credulous than
Europeans. They would believe anything!
However, I finally decided not to try it on and instead spent that night
asleep on the bus as it headed towards St Louis, Missouri.
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| Photo depicting swimming competition and newspaper article about the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis |
Standing on the western bank of the great Mississippi River,
St Louis was in the 19th century one of the largest cities in America. They even held the Olympics there in 1904.
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| St. Louis arch under construction in 1963 |
At the time of my visit however, there were dozens of larger
US cities. The locals had just started
building what they claimed would be the world’s largest arch. Nobody could tell
me why it was needed. Little progress had been made and there was not much to
see, but it was completed within two or three years.
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| Old St. Louis courthouse with completed arch in background |
I went to the main court building in St Louis, since I wanted to see the US trial system at work. I saw few trials, but instead made friends with several local lawyers of my own age, who took me on several tours of the best local bars. They teased me about the British habit of wearing white wigs in court. They were very proud of the fact that the city took its name from King Louis of France, so I decided to tease them in return. I told them that the whole world outside the United States believed that the city was named after “Satchmo” – the trumpeter Louis Armstrong.
They decided to teach me a lesson and served me with a court
order requiring me to report to the chambers of a local judge, who was one of
their buddies. I did so and His Honor
lectured me for an hour or two on world politics. Then he told me all about Miranda, a rapist
from Arizona who had just been sent to jail for several decades on the strength
of his confession, obtained by police interrogation, before which he had not
been advised of his right to counsel nor of his right to remain silent.
Miranda‘s appeal against conviction was making its way to the US Supreme Court
at that very moment. It was a matter of great interest to attorneys across the
nation. How did we handle such matters in England? When I began to explain, His Honor stopped
me. The local bar association were
meeting tomorrow night, he said. I must
attend that meeting and tell them all about it. I did so and, if the Q & A
session afterwards was any indication, my lecture was a great success. His
Honor was very pleased with my performance.
He then told the meeting that I would be attending next time to talk
about the operation of England’s legal aid system.
In those days, US legal aid was limited to serious criminal
cases only, but in England it was available for most civil cases also. How did that work? Our guest from across the pond will be here
to tell us. This judicial pronouncement was met with a ripple of applause and I
made my exit. I checked out of my hotel
at once and kept going until I reached the bus station, where I flung myself
onto a bus headed for Denver, Colorado.
I figured that His Honor’s jurisdiction was limited to the great state
of Missouri and did not extend into the Rocky Mountains.
I never returned for a repeat performance but, every time I
hear a mention during a TV legal thriller of the defendant’s Miranda rights, I
feel uneasy. Are there a bunch of lawyers in St Louis still patiently hoping
that their speaker will re-appear? Is
there an ancient Missouri judge, furiously signing court orders that apply to
me? At that time, I never expected to
return to the US and thought that I could safely escape.
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| Kansas City, MO skyline |
On the bus, I had a lengthy sleep during which we traveled through Kansas City, home of that girl in her early teens whom I have mentioned above. I did not even notice her hometown, nor did I pay any attention to the hundreds of miles of cornfields that occupied the state of Kansas. However, I took more notice as high mountains appeared in the distance.
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| State Capitol in Denver, Colorado |
We were approaching the Rockies and, in particular, the state capital of Colorado which is the city of Denver. It’s nicknamed “the Mile High City”, because the State Capitol building stands exactly 5,200 feet above sea level.
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| Postcard of Mt. Evans and Echo Lake in Denver Mountain Parks, Colorado |
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| Backside of Colorado postcard |
I arrived there on November 6th 1963 and spent three days there.
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| US Mint in Denver |
All I can recall at this distance of time is enjoying a tour
of the US Mint, already over a century old even then. The scenery on the
mountain roads in and out of Denver was spectacular. I spent three days there
before pushing on. My next destination was Salt Lake City, state capital of
Utah.
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| Great Salt Lake Beach |
When I first arrived in Salt Lake City on November 11th 1963,
my focus was upon The Great Salt Lake on the shore of which the city stood.
This lake was and is the largest in the United States outside the Great
Lakes. I was told that the saline in the water created such buoyancy that
it was impossible for a swimmer to sink. I rather doubted this and hoped to
disprove the theory. However, November in northern Utah is no time for an open
air swim. Moreover, the lake stank! Its water level was at a record low and the
land at the edge of the lake was like a beach with the tide out. On that land,
lay many rotting insects killed by the saline. This was no place to spend
my time, but fortunately there was a more agreeable sight to see.
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| Postcard showing Brigham Young monument in front of the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah |
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| Backside of Salt Lake City postcard |
It was the Mormon tabernacle. This huge building had been erected a century earlier, when the Mormons had fled west from persecution in Illinois and had stopped here to settle. “This is the place”, their leader (Brigham Young) is said to have proclaimed, when they arrived at the edge of the great lake. The tabernacle that they then built is to this day a triumph of architecture and engineering. I remember sitting in the back row, while someone climbed into the pulpit at the front and dropped a pin. So perfect were the acoustics of the building that that I heard the noise made by that dropping pin.
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| Mormon Tabernacle |
Wagon trains taking pioneers from “back east” must have passed by this tabernacle in the 1850s on their way to California. What must those pioneers have thought at the sight of this newly built wonder in the middle of nowhere?
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| Painting of an encampment of covered wagons on their way to California |
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| Nevada ghost town |
The bus made its way westwards from Utah and then moved on though the Nevada desert, empty save for the occasional ghost town. These were abandoned mining communities, where it was no longer worth looking for gold and silver.
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| Map of Nevada |
The two big cities in Nevada are Reno and Las Vegas, both of which are located in the extreme west of the state just before the California state line. The reason for that was simple. These cities allowed gamblers to do under Nevada law what is forbidden in California.
Reno served the San Francisco area in the north and Las Vegas served the Los Angeles area in the south. In 1963, Las Vegas was in the process of overtaking Reno as Nevada’s major gambling center, so I wasted no time on the casinos of Reno. I could “do” casinos later when I passed through Las Vegas.
What was novel to me about Reno were the little wedding chapels, where one could just show up and ask to be married. Of course, one needed to provide one’s own spouse, so I had no use for these chapels personally, but they fascinated me because it was all so different from England, where one married in a church or in a government register office. The private enterprise system had no part to play in the process in the UK. The other big difference lay in ease of divorce. In Reno, getting a divorce was almost as easy as buying a burger. Such was Nevada law at the time. Fill in a few simple forms, pay a small fee and one was free to remarry. If an American husband or wife wished to warn a spouse that they were in danger of marriage breakdown, he or she would threaten to take a trip to Reno.
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| Elvis at the Little White Chapel |
Divorce by consent was not permitted in England. Those in England, with the misfortune to face marriage breakdown, were required to face the stress and expense of contested legal proceedings before they could move on with their lives. I saw several happy marriage ceremonies take place in Reno as I passed through. At the time, the puritan in me was shocked at the ease of divorce compared to England and at the ease of re-marrying. Was this not an attack on the sacred institution of marriage?
At this distance of time however, the humanity of the Nevada procedure appeals to me much more than the cruelty of the English way of divorce. The sanctity of marriage is not strengthened by giving a tough time to those struggling with the hardship of marriage breakdown. Over fifty years on, I can finally understand that. The multiple recordings of Mendelssohn’s ”Wedding March”, that I had so often heard in Reno, were still ringing in my ears, as I climbed aboard the bus out of town. I had never heard the tune so often in such a short time.
However, I took comfort from the fact that I was now on my way to San Francisco. Would I leave my heart there? Apparently someone called Tony Bennett had done so and, in 1963, had climbed to the top of the charts with his song telling the American public all about his loss.
On November 14th 1963, I caught my first sight of the Pacific Ocean. It was not blue as I expected. I celebrated my arrival in San Francisco by crossing The Golden Gate Bridge on foot. The bridge runs across the entrance to San Francisco Bay in a north/south direction. At that time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world and I walked on it for nearly two miles. It seemed to me then like a pleasant stroll but today, when it’s an effort for me to walk out of the house to empty my own mail box, I realize that it was quite a distance. If my plan to repeat this trip over 50 years later ever comes to fruition, this “stroll” is something that I won’t be doing again.
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| Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco CA |
As I walked, I was distracted by the ships passing underneath me and by the sight of the island of Alcatraz, sitting in the bay quite near the bridge. A few months earlier, US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had ordered the closure of the famous penitentiary located on the island. Thus, the grim prison buildings that were visible to me in the distance had just been emptied.
The authorities famously claimed that no prisoner had ever escaped from Alcatraz, but that may not have been true. One or two prisoners had disappeared, and it is claimed that they then drowned in the cold waters surrounding the island. This may just be a face saver. As a strong swimmer when young, I could probably have covered the distance to the mainland, currents permitting. Then I tested the November water temperature in the Bay. Compared to England, it wasn’t that cold. Perhaps an escapee actually made it and is presently enjoying an octogenarian life in the sunshine somewhere. Who knows?
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| San Francisco cable car with Alcatraz in background |
My other memory of San Francisco is of the streetcars, which were deployed on the city’s very steep streets. Traveling uphill and downhill on them was such fun, because the many street intersections were on the level. Therefore the vehicle was one moment on a steep incline and the next moment on the level and these variations were rapidly repeated as the journey proceeded. I loved the architecture in San Francisco.
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| Postcard from China town in San Francisco |
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| Backside of San Francisco postcard |
By now, I was still way behind schedule and thousands of miles away from New York City, from where I was due to sail in little more than a month. Early next morning, I therefore took the bus onto the Pacific Coast Highway headed towards Los Angeles, a few hundred miles to the south. I took care to do this in the daytime because there were sights to be seen as we traveled down the coast. The highway stayed mostly close to the coast, even though the hilly terrain created cliffs by coming right down to an ocean, which was becoming even more blue or was that my imagination? The twists and turns of the highway created spectacular scenery. I broke my journey exactly midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles at the Hearst Castle at San Simeon.
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| Hearst Castle in San Simeon CA |
This overlooked the ocean and had been built by William Randolph Hearst, the famous newspaper mogul, whose career is said to have inspired the film “Citizen Kane” with Orson Welles in the title role.
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| William Randolph Hearst, Winston Churchill, and Louis B. Mayer |
Hearst Castle wasn’t like any castle that I’d ever seen before. It was more like a wonderful great museum, but one cannot deny that it was palatial and worthy of inspection. I scrambled back aboard the bus, which by twilight was rolling into the City of The Angels – Los Angeles. It was November 16th, 1963. Hollywood was what I wanted to see.
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| Road To Morocco - Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, and Bing Crosby |
I succeeded in seeing a real film star, when I was allowed onto a studio lot to become part of a studio audience for a TV panel show. She was Dorothy Lamour, whose career by 1963 was in deep decline. Nevertheless, she had been a big star in the 1940s when she made a series of films with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope entitled “The Road to …”. Of course, the place name altered for each film.
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| Postcard of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood |
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| Backside of Grauman's postcard |
My only other connection with the stars was at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Here the stars were honored by having their footprints and handprints etched in cement and thereby preserved for posterity.
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| Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russel at handprint ceremony at Grauman's in 1953 |
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| President Donald Trump's star on Hollywood Walk of Fame |
I visited the famous Brown Derby restaurant and the Disneyland theme park. The latter was then a minor edition of what Disney would later create in Florida, but it impressed me at the time. Then I was stopped by the police. My crime was jaywalking.
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| Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood |
I had sprinted across an empty street with no traffic in sight, but I had not used a pedestrian crossing. I explained to the cop that jaywalking was not an offence where I came from. That was true in those days, but the explanation did me no good and I duly received a ticket. The cop then became friendly with me and proceeded to tell me his life story. He had just completed a Master’s Degree in some obscure subject and was very proud of this achievement. I acted impressed, but it was then that I first became aware of America’s strange preoccupation with college degrees. This was quite different from Britain, where only a tiny percentage of the population chose to attend university. Employers there were far more interested in the job applicant’s work experience and other qualities. Yet nearly all Americans see a college degree as essential to success, despite the fact that the world’s richest man (self-made Bill Gates of Microsoft) does not have one. Graduation ceremonies are a big deal in America and Americans willingly obligate themselves to repay huge student loans in order to obtain a college degree, which in many cases is worthless. At the start of their working lives, Americans handicap themselves with big debt which cannot even be discharged by bankruptcy. It’s not a bit like that In Britain.
I never paid that jaywalking ticket, so it may be that I have a California criminal record dating back to 1963. I simply left town and headed for Las Vegas, which is in Nevada just across the California state line.
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| Las Vegas strip in the 1960's |
The casinos in Las Vegas were very stylish in 1963. They were full of blackjack and roulette tables. The customers were well dressed and dignified. I was admitted free of charge to sophisticated cabarets at which nationally known artists were performing. When I visited casinos in Las Vegas fifty years later, it was a different world. The casinos were full of slot machines and the customers were mostly slobs. I count myself fortunate to have had the opportunity of enjoying Las Vegas in its prime.
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| Las Vegas today |
When I arrived in Las Vegas and just as I was leaving the Greyhound bus, I was approached by a studious looking young white guy of about my own age. “Will you be checking into a hotel here?” he asked me in perfect English, even though he claimed to be a tourist from Central America. When I replied that I would need to find a hotel, he told me how terribly expensive all the Vegas hotels were. “Why don’t we share a hotel room and split the cost?”, he suggested. He seemed to be respectable, educated and not homosexual, so I agreed to save some money in this way. I must have been mad !!! We checked into a twin-bedded hotel room and I went to bed. This guy did not. He sat around reading, apparently waiting for me to fall asleep. I was not afraid of him physically, because I was much more powerfully built than him and, in those days, I had no fear. But what would he get up to after I fell asleep? Would he steal all my money and disappear? My American journey was being financed entirely by cash and travelers checks that I carried on my person. I carried no credit cards and was not in touch with any bank, either in the US or in England or in Africa, that would help me if I lost my money. And I had nobody to turn to in an emergency. Nobody within a radius of thousands of miles even knew me. My solution to my problem was to stay awake all night, which I managed to do. In the early hours of the morning, my suspicious roommate fell asleep and I checked out of the hotel before he awoke. Dawn was just breaking in Vegas as I headed to the bus station and scrambled aboard a bus. I slept all the way to my next destination, which was Phoenix, Arizona. I was never again tempted to save money by sharing a bedroom with a stranger.
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| Inside the beautiful Fox Cinema in Phoenix - now demolished |
There was little to see in Phoenix, which was hot and dry, even though it was now mid-November. The city was small and provincial compared with the cities that I had recently visited, so I spent my time in an air-conditioned cinema watching a famous film, newly released. It was “West Side Story”, the highlight of which was a song called “Maria”. I could not get that song out of my head as the bus rolled out of Phoenix and headed towards Texas, where an event was to occur during my visit that would stun the world.
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| Tony and Maria on West Side Story movie poster |
My destination was El Paso, a city in the extreme west of Texas and situated on the Mexican border. I checked into my hotel there on the evening on November 21st, 1963.
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| US customs border crossing between El Paso and Juarez Mexico |
When I awoke the following morning, my plan was to visit Mexico and in particular the city of Juarez which was separated from El Paso by a dried up river bed. It was called the Rio Grande and served as the border between the US and Mexico. Juarez was within easy walking distance of my El Paso hotel and I headed there on foot. I joined the queue waiting to pass through the border checkpoint. Everyone else in the queue was short and dark and Mexican. I guess that my appearance suggested that I was the only American in the queue, which might be why an American border guard walked up to me saying “The President’s been shot”. It did not occur to me that he was referring to US President John F Kennedy. I assumed that he was referring to the Mexican president. Were not assassinations routine occurrences in Latin American countries? “So Is the border still open?”, I asked. “Can I still cross into Mexico?” The guard turned his back on me, clearly disgusted at my lack of concern for President Kennedy, but still I did not get it. Soon I was walking into downtown Juarez, which was a delight, quite different from the hell on earth that murderous drug cartels would turn the place into a few decades later.
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| Postcard from Juarez Mexico shows home of the Bermudez family |
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| Backside of Juarez postcard |
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| Newspaper about Kennedy assassination |
Soon I could see El Paso in the distance on the other side of the border with many of its buildings flying the Stars and Stripes. All these flags were flying at half-staff and then it hit me and the penny dropped. I realized for the first time that it was President Kennedy, who had been assassinated. The entire Texas-Mexico border had been closed, even though the President had been murdered in Dallas, which was hundreds of miles away at the other end of Texas. I was not allowed back into the US that night and had to spend the night in Juarez with not so much as toothbrush to help me. Fortunately, I found a good hotel in Juarez for the night and the border was re-opened the following morning because it had been decided by then that the assassin was not going to escape to Mexico. Lee Harvey Oswald had already been captured and was in police custody.
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| Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald |
Returning to my hotel room in El Paso, I could not tear myself away from the television, as I watched the American nation react to the assassination of their president. I was fascinated by all the conspiracy theories that were advanced. This is what I was doing when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death while in police custody. I actually saw it happen live on TV.
Here’s the link to “How Juarez Mexico Has Changed”, a post I wrote several years ago in greater detail about my visit there. It was and still is our most widely read post on this blog.
My next planned destination was the city of Houston, hundreds of miles away in the east of Texas and quite close to Dallas, where the assassination had occurred. I debated whether to visit Dallas instead, but decided to stick with Houston. After all, if the Dallas Police Department could not protect Oswald while in police custody, how could I rely upon them to protect me. So I left El Paso for Houston.
On my arrival in Houston, I visited what was then being hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. It had been under construction for over a year and would shortly be finished and open to the public. It was of course the Houston Astrodome. If this sports stadium was to be built today, it would be no big deal, but in 1963 it was a very big deal. It was a pioneer in so many ways. It was the world’s first multi-purpose domed stadium. It would host baseball and basketball and NFL football. It would host concerts and political conventions.
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| Interior of Houston Astrodome |
Playing under a roof was a novelty, as was the use of artificial turf. It was even air-conditioned, and the lack of wind made it perfect for baseball pitchers. No longer would sport in Houston be at the mercy of heavy rains and fierce heat.
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| Derelict Houston Astrodome sits next to new NRG stadium |
While it is sad to know that today, in 2017, this stadium is obsolete and unused and too expensive to demolish, one can take heart by remembering all the major events it hosted during the past half century. And I saw it being built!!!
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| Postcard from Candles hotel in New Orleans |
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| Backside of New Orleans postcrd |
My next destination was New Orleans, a city that I fell in love with. Indeed, it was my favorite American city with San Francisco a distant second. I stayed in a hotel on Basin Street.
Everyone everywhere had heard of the Basin Street Blues, probably the most famous jazz song of all time. I enjoyed listening to the jazz and the Cajun cooking. I admired the architecture in the French Quarter. I would have liked to stay much longer, but it was already November 29th, 1963 and my ship was to sail from far distant New York in two weeks’ time and I has so much more still to see and to do. So, I took a bus to the east and soon arrived in Mobile, Alabama.
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| Rev. Martin Luther King giving sermon on civil rights |
My memory of Mobile is of encountering a crowd of angry white people, while I was walking in downtown. They were calling for a boycott of a white owned restaurant which had just started to serve people of all races. If I had had more guts, I would have spent some money in that restaurant, but I nevertheless hated what I was seeing and left town immediately. I have not mentioned race relations in this tale of a journey across 1963 America, because there is really nothing to say. Relations between the races in America seemed to me to be very relaxed, compared to my experiences in Africa. Apart from this sad incident in Alabama that I have just mentioned and even though civil rights legislation was then moving through Congress, the races in America seemed to treat each other decently in 1963 as I far as I could see. It was a long way from the toxic racial polarization of 2017.
Now I had to cover some miles quickly, so I traveled hundreds of miles from Alabama to Miami in the extreme south of Florida without even getting off the bus. I did not even get off the bus to see Orlando, which was then a sleepy little town in citrus country.
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| Downtown Orlando in 1963 |
Later in life, I lived happily for many years in Orlando which grew enormously and is now an important city. Its present status as a tourist mecca owes much to the arrival of Disney World but, as my bus passed through the orange groves, that was all in the future. In 1963, Walt Disney was still secretly buying up the land for his massive theme park.
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| Walt Disney walking on land he bought for new DisneyWorld theme park in Florida |
My bus eventually arrived in Miami with its busy port and many waterfront high rise buildings. There seemed to be many Cuban refugees in downtown Miami, and they were all demonstrating, but it seemed to me that they had a variety of complaints. Some protesters were targeting Castro, who had recently taken over their island. Others had a quarrel with the US government over its failure to support the recent “Bay of Pigs invasion” where they had hoped to recapture Cuba. Others were marching just because they could, unlike in Cuba from where they had recently arrived. Everyone seemed to be speaking Spanish, so I did not feel at home. I enjoyed some Cuban food but did not even look for a hotel. Instead, I headed for the airport. My flight took me to Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas.
Even though it’s less than 200 miles off the Florida shore, Nassau was a different world from the American mainland. I was familiar with the twilight of the British empire because I had just spent two or three years in Nigeria, which had only gained its independence from Britain in 1960. There was the same atmosphere here, even though the Bahamas were not as far along the road to independence as Nigeria. In fact, the Bahamas did not become independent until 1973. Yet here were the same ingredients in the political cocktail. There was the same overwhelmingly black population, with its politicians jockeying for post-independence power. There was the same white governor supported by white senior civil servants appointed by London. Commerce was still controlled by the whites, although in the case of Nigeria it was by the great European trading companies while in the case of the Bahamas it was by the Bay Street Boys. Bay Street was a major street running through downtown Nassau and the “Boys” were a group of white businessmen born in the Bahamas who then controlled big business. However, one big difference between the two former colonies was tax haven status. Nigeria never was a tax haven, but the Bahamas in 1963 was full of banks, lawyers and accountants specializing in tax avoidance. Nassau lies on the small island of New Providence. Indeed, the island is so small that I was able to see most of it during my short stay by hiring a bicycle. Although there are many larger islands in the Bahamian chain, most Bahamians live in Nassau.
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| Paradise Beach Nassau 1963 |
I found Nassau – with its perfect climate, British pubs and white beaches surrounded by a turquoise sea – to be great fun. I visited Parliament Square, which was dominated by a large marble statue of Queen Victoria surrounded by pink and white government buildings in the colonial style.
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| Policeman wearing Pith Helmet |
In the early months of World War Two, which began on September 3rd, 1939, the Duke and Duchess fled from France as it was invaded by the Nazis and ended up in Spain and Portugal. By the summer of 1940, Hitler had reached the English Channel and was poised to invade Britain. The rumor was that Hitler planned to install the Duke as his puppet king, as soon as he had conquered Britain. I do not believe that the Duke would have gone along with Hitler’s plan, even though the Duchess might have. The Duke was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even he would have realized that such treason on his part would have led to his certain execution after the war, if Germany lost. However, if the Duke had been kidnapped by the Germans while in neutral Spain or Portugal, who knows what the Germans would have forced him to do. Churchill’s solution to this problem was to appoint the Duke to be Governor of the Bahamas and to send a warship to Portugal to collect him and take him to Nassau.
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| Duke and Duchess of Windsor |
So, the Duke spent the whole of World War Two in Nassau far away from the Nazis. The Duchess thought living in Government House, Nassau, to be beneath her and spent as much time in New York City as she could. She loathed the island. The Duke made a poor Governor. Apart from the fact that he was deeply racist, he botched the investigation into the 1943 murder of Sir Harry Oakes, a leading businessman in the colony. There were murder charges which failed to result in convictions. At the end of the war, the Duke and Duchess made their way back to France and tried to forget their years in Nassau. Unlike the Duke and Duchess, I would like to return there someday.
Time was flying by. It was now early December and my ship sailed from New York City on the 13th. I needed to move up the eastern coastline of the United States at top speed. When my plane arrived back in Miami from Nassau, I lost no time in heading north. By evening, I had reached the city of Jacksonville, close to the Florida/Georgia state line. I spent the night in a hotel there, but my thoughts about that city were the same as my thoughts about Phoenix, Arizona. It was a very provincial city with nothing much to see.
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| Mourners file past President Kennedy's grave in Arlington VA 1963 |
Next day, I made a journey of several hundred miles to the north and finally arrived in the capital of the United States of America – Washington, DC. It was December 6th, 1963. The weather was warm. It was like early autumn in London. Before I visited anywhere else in DC, there was somewhere I had to go. It was Arlington, the cemetery where President Kennedy had been laid to rest a few days earlier. I joined hundreds of mourners who were filing past the grave. I saw the eternal flame, which Mrs. Kennedy had insisted be a feature of the gravesite. It was all very moving. It was over forty years later before I was to visit Arlington again.
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| Tombstone of Dale V. Lally Jr. in Arlington National Cemetary |
That latter visit was for the funeral of my wife’s only brother, Dale V Lally, Jr.
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| Postcard of The White House in Washington DC |
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| Backside of White House postcard |
I saw all of DC’s major attractions, such as The White House and The Lincoln Memorial. I entered the Capitol building, which is the home of the US Congress. I enjoyed the view from the top of the Washington Monument which, for a short time in the late 19th century until the Eiffel Tower was built in Paris, was the highest building in the world. There were nearly a thousand steps inside the monument leading to the top, but fortunately there was also an elevator.
Then I took the bus north to Philadelphia and the weather began to deteriorate. Africa was hot, my American journey had been pleasantly warm and so had the Bahamas. I had forgotten what it was like to be cold. Now I was reminded.
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| Postcard of Liberty Bell in Philadelphia |
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| Backside of Liberty Bell postcard |
When I arrived in Philadelphia, I found it to be very much like parts of my hometown of London. I went to Independence Hall to see that iconic symbol of American independence, the Liberty Bell. The bell is no longer kept where I saw it. It is now kept in a special Liberty Bell Center. This very bell is said to have been rung in 1776 at the time of the reading of the Declaration of Independence. It is now disfigured by a large crack, for which I deny any responsibility.
During the Revolutionary War, the British captured Philadelphia in 1777 and occupied it until the following year. They may claim to have cracked the Liberty Bell deliberately during that time. Yet that would be a myth because the crack did not appear until the 19th century.
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| Article from New York Times about the Liberty Bell Hoax |
Another myth occurred on April 1st, 1996, when Taco Bell announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell and that henceforth it would be known as The Taco Bell. This was greeted with outrage across the country until it was realized that this was an April Fools Day joke. But it was a highly profitable joke, because sales by Taco Bell of tacos, enchiladas and burritos on that day beat all records.
I then pushed on to New York City and arrived a couple of days before the ship sailed. This was good because it gave me time to see the sights there before embarking on the voyage to England, even though the Big Apple was freezing and covered in snow.
Weather conditions did not stop me moving around New York City and enjoying the sights including Times Square, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park. Then there was the Statue of Liberty offshore in the distance and as many skyscrapers as one could possibly wish for. Here’s the link to "Statues of Liberty", another post on this blog of a trip I made with my family in March of 2012 and our visit to the Statues of Liberty in New York and and earlier trip to the replica in Paris.
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| Postcard of Empire State building in New York |
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| Backside of Empire State building postcard |
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| World Trade Center with Statue of Liberty in foreground |
Finally, it was time to embark on that magnificent ocean liner, The RMS Queen Mary, which took me majestically down river and thence into the Atlantic on December 13th 1963. I had done it. In less than two months, I had traveled 10,000 miles around the United States and seen so much. Most importantly of all, I had not missed my ship back to England.
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| RMS Queen Mary sailing out of New York harbor |
I had always liked Americans, dating back to my encounters with GIs as a small boy in World War Two London. I liked and respected the US nation and its people even more after my 1963 visit. If I could have seen into the future, as New York City faded away into the distance and then over the horizon, it would have disappointed me to learn that I would not again set foot on United States soil for almost another twenty years. Yet it would have excited me to learn that I would spend the second half of my adult life in the United States and become a US citizen. I would not have been troubled by the fact that I shall almost certainly die in the United States, because in those days I intended to live forever.
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| Pat's photo of the Art Deco bar on the Queen Mary in 2012 |
Bad weather made my Atlantic crossing an uncomfortable one, even though I had a spacious cabin to myself. My memories of the liner are dominated by big staircases with lots of brass banisters in the art deco style. The weather was too cold and unpleasant for any of the passengers to spend any time outside on deck. In the past, the RMS Queen Mary had broken all records in achieving the fastest transatlantic crossing, but it was her record-breaking during World War Two that is most spectacular. The ship was taken over by the government to move US troops from stateside to the conflict in Europe. She would carry as many as 16,000 troops at a time with the men sleeping in shifts!!!
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| RMS Queen Mary serving as troopship during WWII |
Never before or since has any ship carried so many passengers. I did not realize it at the time, but the RMS Queen Mary was near the end of its active life and I was one of its last passengers. She had made her maiden voyage back in 1936, but now the jet age had arrived. She could not to compete with much faster and cheaper ways of crossing the Atlantic. She had become a huge financial loss maker for the owners, The Cunard Line. By 1967, she had stopped these voyages altogether.
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| RMS Queen Mary bell |
During the war, the ship had been accompanied by escort vessels to protect her against submarine attacks. In October 1942, one such vessel (HMS Curacoa) was literally run over and sunk by The Queen Mary, which could not stop to pick up survivors. With U-boats in the vicinity, her orders were to keep going and stop for nothing. Most of the 339-man crew of the HMS Curacoa was lost at sea. When the Queen Mary sliced through their ship, many of the Curacoa’s crew must have died without the faintest idea of what was happening. Thus, there is a high level of paranormal activity in the bowels of the Queen Mary, even though I have no personal experience of it. I use the present tense, because the Queen Mary and its ghosts still exist.
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| RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach CA |
The ship is to this day moored in the harbor at Long Beach, California, and is open to the public. I was in southern California for my 75th birthday party in September 2012, when I made a tour of the ship. When visiting the ship with my wife Pat and daughter, Tara (seen in video with me below), a member of the Queen Mary staff told me that I was one of the very few visitors who had ever sailed on her, but I digress.
Let’s return to 1963. After making a stop at Cherbourg in northern France, the Queen Mary finally docked at its home port of Southampton on the south coast of England. From there, it was by train to London and to the home of my parents. I was back in time for Christmas.
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| My daughter, Tara Patten, posing as Queen of the World on the deck of the Queen Mary |
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my memoir. It was the memories of this odyssey in 1963 that served as the inspiration for my first novel, Retirement of a Reprobate. It’s a story about a British man, Joe Morrison, whose stolen pension leads him on a path to murder. When a stranger in a bar in Nigeria asked Joe to do him a favor, he never imagined it would involve the theft of fifty million dollars in solid gold bars and being hunted by ruthless Mafia hit men in Chicago.
The book is available in digital and print. Click on here to purchase the book on Amazon. This is an affiliate link which pays me a commission.
This piece, written by Bob, was originally posted on our website on April 17, 2019.
