Our cross-country journey took four days, pretty quick for back then. Dad had traded in the Jeepster for a hardtop Plymouth Cranbrook, a big, bulbous four-door sedan shaped like an inverted bathtub. Its roomy back seat—which, this being the ’50s, had no seat belts—was mine to stretch out on.
As we drove west, eventually hooking up with the famous Route 66, I sensed an urgency in my parents to get there, to begin life anew in California as soon as possible. So it wasn’t much of a sightseeing trip.
We did stop in Duncan to call on Mom’s family. Mom was born there in 1927, when Duncan was known as “the buckle on the Oil Belt.” The Speegles, of German descent, were reasonably well-to-do. They owned the town’s grocery store and meat market, as well as the mineral rights to a few oil fields. The brains of their business operations belonged not to our Granddad Butch, a bumbling, affable man who drank too much, but to his sister, our aunt Julia.
I met Julia for the first time during our brief stay in Duncan. She was a trip: an exuberant, charismatic woman who wore oversized cat-eye glasses and treated her voluminous white hair with a blue rinse, pinning it up high like Marge Simpson’s. Julia owned and ran the Wade Hotel and Café in Duncan, a handsome three-story redbrick building on the main drag, and populated the lobby level with what she described as the world’s largest collection of dog figurines. Every available surface was covered with little dogs, be they ceramic, wooden, or metal. When you entered the hotel, you were greeted by Julia’s collection of talking mynah birds, one of whom said “Take off like a jet!” The birds also sometimes swore. If they got too raunchy in front of kids like me, Julia silenced them by throwing a drop cloth over their cage.
We made only two touristy stops on the trip. The first was to stop in Arizona to see the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest National Park. At the former, I picked up a little vial of colored sand as a souvenir, and at the latter, a chunk of petrified wood. The second was Las Vegas for a night, so Mom and Dad could see the famous Strip in all its gaudy glory.
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CLINT
For the record: given that this cross-country trip took place in midsummer and I was born the following April, the prevailing family belief is that I was conceived in Las Vegas. This is one of those rare occasions in which what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas.
RON
It’s something I prefer not to think about, since I am absolutely certain that I shared the hotel room with Mom and Dad.
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The Howard Family Road Trip came to a close when, in August 1958, we pulled into our new hometown: Burbank, California. Dad had first glimpsed the town nearly a decade earlier when the touring production of Mister Roberts rolled into Los Angeles. Dad’s roommate on the road was an actor named Lee Van Cleef, who had a small part as a military policeman. One night in L.A., the great producer and director Stanley Kramer caught Mister Roberts and was struck by Van Cleef’s elongated face and dark, villainous looks. He asked Lee, my dad’s best friend in the company, to audition for his next picture: the western High Noon, starring Gary Cooper. “Do you know how to ride a horse?” Kramer said. Lee didn’t miss a beat. “Of course I do!” he said. An audition date was set.
The problem was that Lee had lied. He was from New Jersey and had never been on a horse in his life. Dad swooped in to the rescue. He was a genuine horseman and outdoorsman, the eldest of Engle and Ethel Beckenholdt’s three children, born on November 17, 1928. His folks raised hogs, cattle, and wheat, adeptly navigating the Depression by buying, improving, and flipping farms along the Kansas-Oklahoma border, each farm nicer and bigger than the last.
From the age of five, Dad carried out his daily chores: mending fences, feeding the hogs, setting traps for possums and raccoons. He was also entrepreneurial, skinning the critters he caught and selling their pelts at market for twenty-five cents apiece. As he grew older, Dad became an expert rider who rounded up his family’s cattle at day’s end. So he was particularly qualified to help out Lee.