daafocus.blogg.se

If most of Michigan eerily resembled a palm-down left hand, Paris was located at approximately the lowest joint of the ring finger.

Somewhere along the line the “h” was dropped.

This was especially true in the tiny, unincorporated township of Paris, named in the 1850s for early settler John Parish. Unseasonably cool temperatures combined with near-constant rain, trapping residents indoors and tamping down what had been, for the last fifteen years or so, an ever-increasing influx of tourists eager to enjoy the state’s bracing mix of sprawling woodlands, arching hills, and sparkling lakes. Excerptīad weather plagued much of Michigan during the late summer of 1923. The automobile would transform the American landscape, the American economy, and the American way of life and Guinn brings this seminal moment in history to vivid life. The road trips made the automobile ubiquitous and magnified Ford’s reputation, even as Edison’s diminished. The Vagabonds is “a portrait of America’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile” (NPR) but it also sheds light on the important relationship between the older Edison and the younger Ford, who once worked for the famous inventor. But newspaper coverage of these trips was extensive, and as cars and roads improved, the summer trip by automobile soon became a desired element of American life. Cars were unreliable and the roads were even worse.

They would continue their summer road trips until 1925, when they announced that their fame made it too difficult for them to carry on.Īlthough the Vagabonds traveled with an entourage of chefs, butlers, and others, this elite fraternity also had a serious purpose: to examine the conditions of America’s roadways and improve the practicality of automobile travel. The following year Ford, Edison, and tire maker Harvey Firestone joined together on a summer camping trip and decided to call themselves the Vagabonds.

In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Thomas Edison in Florida and toured the Everglades. A “f ascinating slice of rarely considered American history” ( Booklist)-the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison-whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life.