Hitchhiking to Terre Haute

Hitchhiking to Terre Haute

I've always liked that feeling of freedom I got whenever I hitchhiked. I could choose to go any direction, I did't have to worry about a car, and I never knew who I might meet. Hitchhiking to Terre Haute in the fall of 1967 stands out especially in regards to the latter.

When I was seven my family moved from Levittown to Huntington, well I should say Huntington Station as Huntington proper was a little too upscale for us. Huntington Station was a whole 12 miles away from Levittown. It was about 25 miles, by car, from my grandparents house which was about a stone's throw from the NY city line. I remember my grandparents saying we moved to the country, but it was, in fact, still the suburbs. The area had once been called West Hills and was once home to some guy named Walt Whitman. At the time I really didn't know anything about Walt Whitman but I knew he was notable because my high school was named after him. His old home (birthplace) was just down the block and around the corner from my house, right across the street from Al's gas station. I'd been to Al's many times as it was where we took our cars for repairs. The station had once been on the main road running through the area but that road had since been replaced by a bigger, 4 lane road a block over. Al didn't sell much gas but he was a good mechanic. What always stood out to us was there seemed to always be a bunch of men  there playing poker with Al. Walt Whitman's birth place was a museum that hardly anyone ever visited. In fact I don't remember anyone I knew ever visiting it with the exception of me and my friend Joe. We were given a tour one day after my neighbor caught us cutting through the property. She worked at the museum and perhaps thought this might discourage us from using the museum property as a short cut.

When we moved in our street had lots of girls but just a few of boys. Being 7 I found this a little disappointing. If I had been say 15 I think I would have felt a little different. One of the girls in my new neighborhood was Chris. She did not live on our block but rather around the corner and up a block or so. My earliest memory of seeing her was at the school bus stop. It started raining so her mom came down in a car giving us a place to wait for the bus out of the rain. When Chris's mom learned who I was she told me that she had gone to high school with my dad. Chris had blond hair, big eyes, and I liked the way she looked. She was friendly and outgoing. I tended to be reserved and shy. I would end up liking a few other girls in my neighborhood through the years but Chris was the first girl I liked and, as I remember, the only one I ever had a date with. I'm not sure if that was because I was never bold enough to ask them or, if like Chris, they realized they were good looking enough to have better options. At seven liking a girl was not cool but I found myself liking Chris anyway. I liked Chris but nothing came of it until a few years later when she became my first date. I remember it well. I was nervous, there was no kissing, and there was no second date. Talk about not getting to first base, I didn't dare to even hold her hand. Chris had an older brother, Jeff who was on the varsity basketball team. I looked up to him and he was nice enough to let me shoot hoops with him a few times on the hoop beside his house. I probably liked Jeff almost as much as Chris and I never kissed him or held his hand either.

I started hitchhiking as a teenager. I would hitch to my friend Eddie's house, to the Beach (Crescent) in the summer, and sometimes to high school football games. Our school did not have a football field fit enough for actual games. We had a big high school in a nice neighborhood how come we didn't have a decent football field? Beats me, seems UN-American. Consequently, all our home games were played at a town field (Manor) in Huntington. So not only did I hitch to some away games but also to some home games. I sometimes hitched to school because I missed the bus and it happened more frequently as I got older. I have a talent for putting things off to the last minute. By high school I had the bus timed so that I'd just get to the bus stop as the bus arrived. The obvious problem was that if the bus came the least bit early or I was the least bit late I would miss it. I ran for that bus more than a few times. Hitching to school was easy as the cross street of the bus stop was West Hills Road and it led directly to my high school. There were plenty of cars traveling on the road to the school so when I did miss the bus it would not be unusual for me to get to the school before the bus.

I did a lot of hitching while in college and the military. I've even hitched all the way across the country. However, hitchhiking to Terre Haute, Indiana when I was a freshman at Valparaiso is a most memorable adventure. When I enrolled in college at Valparaiso (Valpo) in Indiana, I found there was not much to do on the weekends. The majority of the social activities were fraternity and sorority based and first semester freshmen were mostly excluded. The town of Valparaiso had little going on. It had one truly bad pizza place and one movie theater. My roommate Rick, also from Long Island (Seaford), and I would sometimes decide to hitchhike to some place on the weekend. We went to Lake Michigan and Chicago a couple of times. One weekend we decided to hitch to Terre Haute to visit my friend and former first date Chris. She was attending Indiana State. While I know Indiana State as the school Chris went to, the rest of the world largely knows it for being the school of basketball legend Larry Bird. Larry grew up in rural Indiana and had a scholarship to play basketball for Bobby Knight at Indiana University. He left. Indianapolis was too cosmopolitan and he preferred a small town rural environment.

Rick and I headed out for Terre Haute one Friday afternoon. We were first picked up by a man who had a hard look about him. He stopped, opened the window, and asked where we were headed, We told him and he motioned for us to get in. That turned out to be both the first and last time he spoke to us. As we were getting in the car I told Rick to stay alert. I got in the front and Rick got in the back. The guy occasionally looked over at me and sort of glared. I never relaxed during that whole ride. When he got to where he was turning off he just stopped and looked over at me and pointed to the door. We quickly got out feeling a bit relieved.

We next got a ride with two friendly guys from the Chicago area. They talked a lot and they said they were headed to Terre Haute. Wow, that was lucky. They told us that when they got off work on Friday they would often pick up some beer and head out to someplace, like Terre Haute, for something to do. Sounded a little like being a freshman at Valpo. They said they had tried to go to Terre Haute before but had never made it there because they usually stopped somewhere along the way and the next day they would simply drive back to Chicago from wherever they were. After a few miles they saw a bar and decided to stop to get some beer as it seemed they had already consumed all the beer they left Chicago with. They popped open a couple of beers and got back on the road. They wasted no time polishing off the six-pack and soon were on the look for another opportunity to buy some more beer. Rick and I were beginning to understand why they had yet to make it to Terre Haute. We asked them why they thought they hadn't, they told us it was because they would either pass out somewhere along the way or get so drunk that they would have to stop to rest. When they came to it would be morning and they would just head home. We thought we should probably get out soon. It was pretty rural and getting dark so we decided we'd stay with them a little while longer hoping we'd get to an area that wasn't so isolated. So far the driving was fine. We soon learned that at the last stop they bought two six-packs. We asked them if they were OK and offered to drive. They told us they were fine and they were going to get us all the way to Terre Haute. It was now dark, raining, and we were somehow in an even more remote area. The road was winding through hills. The driver started complaining that he couldn't see. We shouted “You have your sunglasses on!” He replied “I know, but when I take them off, the lights of the oncoming vehicles blind me.” At this point we wanted out but we were in the middle of nowhere, it was pouring rain. So we put our lives on the line and stayed. We somehow eventually made it to Terre Haute in spite of the condition of our driver. The two guys were elated that they had finally achieved their goal. They wanted to find a bar and buy us a drink. We thanked them and just got out. It turned out that they did not know anyone in Terre Haute. It was just a destination they had picked. I wondered how many tries it was going to take them to get back to Chicago...

Sunday Rick and I headed back to Valpo with the hopes that our return trip would be a little more boring. Our first ride was a middle aged man on his way to pick up his mother for church. He was timid, sort of quiet and jittery. His conversation was focused on drinking and how his mother didn't allow him do it on the “Lord's Day”. He remarked how attractive we both looked and invited us to his house. He seemed a bit disappointed when we turned him down. Although he continued to act rather strange he wasn't drinking yet (thanks to Mom), so we didn't complain. He dropped us off just before he got to his Mother's place.

Our next ride was with an older woman who was also going to pick up her mother for church. Her mother lived a couple of towns away so we got to ride with her for a while. She was very friendly and started telling us about her love life, or lack there of. She then proceeded to tell us she had been praying to God, hoping to find a man under her bed. She next got around to asking me back to her place. At the time I thought she was like 70 but I was only 18 so she was probably at most in her 50's. She continued to try to talk either or both of us into coming home with her. She kept trying, we kept declining. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and told her we needed to get out at the next road because we had a friend who lived there.

A youngish couple, probably in their 30's picked us up next. They seemed nice, friendly, and appeared normal, or so we thought. They had a couple of kids but the kids were at her Mom's house for the day. We chatted with them. He hardly spoke but the woman talked with us pretty much non-stop. She started asking us if we liked jokes and if we had any good ones. She told us that the other day she had heard the funniest joke she'd ever heard but it was a “blue” joke so she felt too embarrassed to tell us. We told her we understood. She couldn't drop it though, and kept bringing up this joke laughing almost uncontrollably. She wished she could tell us to watch our reaction. Finally she says she is going to write it down so we could enjoy it after they've dropped us off. We thought we were finally done with this joke. The conversation briefly got somewhat back to normal with her asking us about school and girls. After a few minutes she says she can't stand it. She wants us to read the joke so she can see our reaction. So Rick and I slowly unfold the paper with the joke and read: “Did you hear about the man who got a hard-on and then ran into a brick wall and broke his nose”. Rick and I looked at each other for a moment and then we burst out laughing. We were not laughing at the joke but that she had spent what seemed like hours laughing and raving about it and that was all it was. She was so pleased that we laughed so much, she proceeded to tell us blue joke after blue joke after blue joke separated only by her quizzing us about our sexual experiences with girls. Rick and I did our best to laugh at each joke and tip-toe around the inquires. When they dropped us off she handed us a piece of paper with her name and address telling us she'd like us to come visit her.

We were now close to Valpo and managed to catch a ride with a couple of students, they somehow refrained from making any advances towards us. Of course many college kids were obsessed with sex and alcohol so who was I to judge. Still I was surprised to find this same obsession to be so prevalent in rural Indiana adults.

I don't really remember a lot about the visit with Chris, but I'll always have the memory of our date. However, I have a few questions for Larry Bird...


This post is in the same time frame as my "Adjusting to College" post of 9/25/18