Alice Huyler Ramsey (at the wheel of her car): These young people–they get a little smarty cat, you know, and they sneak in because they think it`ll frighten somebody. Well, that`s not my idea of good driving. They may be fast, but sooner or later they`re gonna catch it.
I went driving the other day with Alice Huyler Ramsey, who is 90. Mrs. Ramsey has fixed opinions about driving. She ought to. She has been driving for 70 years. At age 22, with a certain determination in her shining eyes, Ramsey became the first woman to drive a car across this country. She left New York`s Broadway at the wheel of a Maxwell with three women passengers, and two months later, after a trip of 3,800 miles on farm roads, through plowed fields and long Indian trails, she drove into San Francisco. The San Bernardino Freeway holds no terrors for a woman like that.
I have always found driving across this country to be an adventure. Ramsey did it when it really was an adventure.
Kuralt: How did you find your way?
Ramsey: Well, we had to find our way mostly by the telephone poles.
Kuralt: The telephone poles?
Ramsey: Yes, they had those all the way across the country, crude and not very tall, and we could usually suppose that the ones with the more wires went to a larger town. We thought that was good common sense. Once or twice we got mistaken.
Kuralt: But there you were, a young woman out in the automotive wilderness. Weren`t you frightened sometimes?
Ramsey: Well, I can only think of one time when we were a little bit scared. We rounded a little hill and off to the right was a group of Indians riding bareback with drawn bows and arrows, great big bows and arrows. All of a sudden they wheeled to the left and came right toward us, and then my heart sort of went down in the bottom of the car, I think. Finally, in front of us across the road jumped a great big jackrabbit. They were hunting this poor jackrabbit with the bow and arrow, and they nonchalantly crossed the road ahead of us and paid no attention to us at all.
As surely as those earlier women who drove wagons down the Oregon Trail, Alice Huyler Ramsey was a pioneer. She wanted to drive a car and did, and still does. She drives across the country `most every summer. She says there`s nothing to it anymore.
MR. MISENHEIMER`S GARDEN
DATELINE: SURRY COUNTY, VA.
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We`ve been wandering the back roads since 1967, and we`ve been to a few places we`ll never forget. One of them was on Route 10, Surry County, Va. We rolled in here on a day in the spring of 1972 thinking this was another of those little roadside rest stops. But there were flowers on the picnic tables. That was the first surprise.
And beyond the tables we found a paradise, a beautiful garden of 13 acres, bright with azaleas, thousands of them, and bordered by dogwoods in bloom, and laced by a mile of paths in the shade of tall pines. It was the loveliest garden I`d ever seen. It made me wonder how large a battalion of state-employed gardeners it took to keep the place up. The answer was it took one old man, and he was nobody`s employee. Walter Misenheimer, a retired nurseryman, created all this in the woods next to his house; created it alone after he retired at the age of 70. He was 83 when I met him and spending every day tending his garden for the pleasure of strangers who happened to stop.
Misenheimer: I like people, and this is my way of following out some of the teachings of my parents. When I was a youngster, one of the things they said was, ”If you don`t try to make the world just a little bit nicer when you leave here, what is the reason for man`s existence in the first place?”
Kuralt: What`s going to happen to this place after you`re gone?
Misenheimer: Well, I imagine that within a few years this will be undergrowth, or nature will take it over again. I have tried to give it to the state. The Parks Department says it is too small for them. The Highway Department says it is too big for them.
Kuralt: You mean, it`s not going to survive?
Misenheimer: I doubt it.
We watched for a while as people enjoyed the beauty of Walter Misenheimer`s garden. And we left, and a few years later somebody sent me a clipping from the Surry County paper. It said Walter Misenheimer had died. I wondered what would happen to his garden.
Some stories have happy endings. Walter Misenheimer`s garden does survive, and so does his spirit, in Haeja Namkoong, a Korean woman. It seems that she stopped by the garden just a few months after we did, back in 1972.
Namkoong: We slowed down and saw a sign and picnic tables and a lot of flowers blooming. We came to the picnic table, found a water spigot, helped ourselves, and we were sort of curious as to what this place was all about. Finally, we saw the old man sort of wobbling around and coming cross the lawn saying ”Hello,” and just waving us to stop. I guess he was afraid we were going to leave.
To please the old man, and herself, Namkoong stayed the afternoon with him, walking in his garden.
When the sun went down that day, the young woman said goodbye to the old man and headed home to Boston, but the roadside Eden called her back. That is, Walter Misenheimer did. He phoned her long distance and asked her to come for a little while and help in the garden.
Namkoong: He was sort of pleading with me, ”Please come down. Just help me for a couple of weeks.”
A couple of weeks only, and then a few more, and then it was Christmas. Haeja Namkoong was 26. She had no family. Neither did Walter Misenheimer and his wife.
Namkoong: From wildflowers to man-grown shrubberies, he taught me. I was interested in learning the whole thing. I was out here almost every day with him.
They became as father and daughter working in the garden, and in time Haeja Namkoong was married in the garden.
Namkoong: He was very proud to give me away. I guess he never thought, since he didn`t have any children of his own, he would give someone away. Other than my mother, I can`t remember anyone who loved me that much and cared for me so much as Mr. Misenheimer.
The garden is still here. Walter Misenheimer died in 1979 and left it to Haeja Namkoong. She pays a caretaker, Ed Trible, to help keep it beautiful for anybody who passes by. Namkoong and her husband and their children live in Richmond now, but they return on weekends to work in the garden.
Namkoong: So, knowing how much the garden meant to him, I want to keep it up and carry on.
GORDON BUSHNELL`S HIGHWAY
DATELINE: WRIGHT, MINN.
As highways go, it isn`t much of one. It goes only 13 miles through the woods and tamarack swamps. It`s all overgrown now. But of all the roads we ever traveled On the Road, I suppose we feel most sentimental about this one. This little road has a story to it.
We met Gordon Bushnell in this same place about this same time of year, August, 1978. Bushnell always thought there ought to be a straight highway from Duluth to Fargo. About 25 years ago he got tired of waiting for the state to build it. He decided he`d better just build it himself.
Bushnell: I`ll tell you the reason I started digging. I had a pain in my side and I went to see the doctor and he said you`ve got to have your gallbladder taken out. And I thought, well, if I have my gallbladder taken out I can`t dig that ditch. So I better start and dig it before I have my gallbladder taken out. And I started working, and the more I worked the better I felt. And the pain went away and I haven`t had my gallbladder taken out yet. After meeting Bushnell, I thought maybe the best thing about Americans is that Yankee stubbornness and persistence against the odds. Here was a retired dairy farmer with nothing but a wheelbarrow and a No. 2 shovel and an ancient John Deere tractor, building a 200-mile highway all alone. When we met him, he had worked on it for more than 20 years, winter and summer. He had finished nine miles. He had 191 miles to go. He was 78 years old.
Kuralt: There must be people who think you`re crazy.
Bushnell: There`s more than you think that think I`m crazy! My wife thinks I am. Maybe I am! But it`s been a lot of fun just the same. There`s fellas have retired–younger than I am–that go and sit down and listen to TV, and they`re dead.
Bushnell kept hoping the state would see the wisdom of a straight road across Minnesota and take over the job from him, but the state never did. That was four summers ago.
Bushnell built his road log by log, and rock by rock, inch by inch, mile by mile, working on it utterly alone for 25 years. This summer Bushnell died. We came out here on a rainy day to find his road already growing up in weeds, which of course led to long thoughts about whether he had wasted the last years of his life. But I remembered something he said on a sunny day four years ago.
Bushnell: You know, just to come out here some days and look and see what you`ve done, it seems to be reward enough.
So he didn`t think all those years were wasted. And one other thing: Now that he`s gone, the state legislature, which never would have built the highway, is impressed by what he did. The state senator from Sturgeon Lake and others have proposed that his road become the Bushnell Memorial Recreational Trail. Hikers on the trail may wonder some day who Bushnell was. Well, I`ll always be glad I got to know who he was.
THE LIVERMORE LIGHT BULB DATELINE: LIVERMORE, CALIF.
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In 1879, Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric light bulb. Twenty-two years later, in 1901, they hung one of the newfangled gadgets in the Livermore, Calif., fire department, and turned it on. It`s still there and still on.
The old bulb has been turned off almost never in 71 years. By today`s standards it should have burned out 852 times by now, but clearly we are not dealing with today`s standards. We are dealing with somebody who made light bulbs to last. The bulb, hand-blown, with a thick carbon filament, was made, apparently, by the Shelby Electric Co., which did not become one of the giants of the nation for an obvious reason: They made light bulbs to last, and nobody ever reordered. One burns on, a memorial to Shelby Electric.
Needless to say, the bulb is accorded a kind of awesome respect by Fire Capt. Kirby Slate and his men.
Slate: We started out with this light bulb over at 2d and Elm–that`s the old fire station, that`s where it was first put. Then it was taken from there and moved to here, and since that time the only knowledge that I have of it not working was when the Works Progress Administration was here in 1937, it was out for a week.
Kuralt: And you never turn it off?
Slate: Never turn it off. Now, we have a switch on it, but to my knowledge no man has ever turned that switch.
Kuralt: And better not?
Slate: And better not, that`s right.
Kuralt: Do you sometimes have a fear that as you glance up at it, it`s going to go out?
Slate: Well, let me put it this way: I just hope that I`m not on duty when it goes out.
As the Livermore firemen went about their work, we stood around for the afternoon, just watching the old bulb burn. In a time when gadgets are forever falling apart or burning out or breaking up, it was kind of nice to spend a day watching a dusty, 71-year-old light bulb just go on and on. If you`re ever in Livermore and need reassurance, we recommend it.
