Title: Trailblazing Thru Milestones 1921
Author: Claude C. Prowell
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-6641-8149-6
Pages: 54
Genre: Memoir
Reviewed By: Susan Brown

Read Book Review

Americans love road trips. They provide a sense of independence, fascinate the imagination and galvanize an adventurous spirit. The exploration of the United States happened well before there were really even roads, but as that changed and with the advent of motorized transportation, road trips took on a whole new dimension. Americans took to their wheels.

This author’s 19-year-old self was not immune to the call of the road. In 1921, with a high school geography text book map of the country, he got on his Indian motorcycle with sidecar attached and set out for the West Coast from his family farm in Wilson County, Tennessee. He went alone, but his parents, although not thrilled with the idea, did not stand in his way. Fried chicken from his Mom was his first meal on the road.

From his first night camping in a cemetery to some minor scrapes and crashes due to half-done roads to filling his pockets with pecans in an orchard in California, 32 days from the start of his trip he was in Los Angeles, California, where he stayed for six months. Along the first leg of his route, he “realized then what a great country the United States was.”

While in Los Angeles, he traded his motorcycle for a Model T Ford. He worked at various jobs, swam in the Pacific Ocean, ate at the Pie House and even took dancing lessons. Many adventures later, he took his memories and his Model T and left L.A. for his trip home, north through California to Oregon, Washington and Canada. From there he dropped back into the country and headed east through the upper states to home. He had traveled close to10,000 miles, through 16 or so states and two Canadian provinces.

He wrote, “This trip was the most interesting and happiest year of my life. I never met a person on the entire trip I didn’t like. I became a part of the country I was traveling thru and the country became a part of me.” He wrote this memoir in 1971, 50 plus years after his cross-country odyssey.

This delightful narrative is a heartfelt reminisce of a young man’s first out-of-town adventure. The detail the author recounts, some five decades later, is extraordinary. His accounting of the places he traveled through is impressive, but it is his through his remembrances of the people he met that we get a glimpse of who Mr. Prowell was — a kind, thoughtful, curious, helpful, trusting, curious, inventive person who never missed an opportunity to try something new or help someone out. Photographs throughout show him at various moments in the trip.

The strength of a memoir, for me, is defined by whether or not I would want to be friends with the person writing it. In just 54 pages I discovered that, yes, Mr. Prowell would have been someone worth knowing. This short recap of an important time in his life not only sparked my interest in him, but awakened my adventurous spirit … hallmarks of a story well told.