August 7, 2005 – The Migration Westward

August 7, 2005 – The Migration Westward

Saturday, October 5th, 1974 started off like hundreds of other mornings in the suburbs of Dallas, an autumn sun rising over the sprawling Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex—a name the region had given itself with the grand opening of DFW airport on January 13, 1974—built on 17,500 acres at a cost of over $700 million, it was called the largest and costliest airport in the world. My wife IM, our two daughters, and I were on hand with the crowd of 200,000 who turned out for the open house the airport sponsored before the opening. The event attracted representatives from many of the major airlines including Air France, which flew in a Concorde—newly airborne on October 1st 1969, the first U.S. landing of the supersonic jet. I recall the Concorde captain commenting during an interview on the huge amount of concrete used in the construction of the massive terminal complex. IM, the girls and I were passing the south end of the sprawling airport early that morning commenting on the opening and asking the girls if they remembered that day. We had all spent the last Friday night at the Holiday Inn North located on the eastbound access road of I-635—the LBJ Freeway—a block east of where it crosses Coit Road. The archetype 1960s motel was replaced by a Best Western Clarion Hotel.

We were heading west in a 1972 green Pontiac Station Wagon, our new 1974 Toyota Corolla in tow, courtesy of a tow bar from E-Z Rents. We had a good week to get to our final destination Sunnyvale, California but expected to arrive the middle of the following week. It seemed very appropriate that as Dallas began a new era with its recently opened airport, we were likewise starting fresh on a new life. I figured Dallas had given just about all it was going to give. If I wanted anything more from life I’d have to go somewhere else to get it, and California, that proverbial land where one went to seek one’s fortune was our destination. The part of the journey we were on now we had made many times over the past six years we had been in Dallas. Arriving in the Big D in October 1968, it seem prophetic that we would be leaving in the same month, in 1974, one month before my 29th birthday—I was still a young man with lots of life ahead of me. We drove west on LBJ, merged onto Interstate 35 south, over Texas 12 for a short run past Texas Stadium, where Tom Landry was still in charge of the Cowboys, then onto Texas 183 west toward Ft. Worth, which like Oakland lived in the shadow of its more glamorous twin. Beyond DFW on 183, we picked up Interstate 820, the loop road around Ft Worth that took us south and west to our rendezvous with Interstate 20 the road west.

Ft. Worth is where east Texas gives way to west Texas and the two are from different cultures. The eastern part of the state gets a greater amount of rainfall than the western; the former green and lush a good part of the year, perfect for farming. In an aerial view of the state, everything west of Abilene is brown, while the land east gets progressively greener. While Ft. Worth is the start of West Texas, Abilene—a creation of the Texas and Pacific Railway—is its core. Ranchers and businessmen successfully lobbied the Texas and Pacific track and town site locator H. C. Whithers to bring the railroad through their land. In 1881, Abilene was born and the men who convinced Whithers to build on their land profited handsomely—I’m sure the same fortune befell those who owned the land in and around DFW. As many times as we’ve driven I-20 between Dallas and El Paso, we never had the occasion to spend any time in Abilene and this trip was no exception. We had stopped earlier at an Exxon station in Weatherford, Texas just 30 miles west of Ft Worth, put 12 gallons of gas in the Pontiac, gave the girls a chance to run around and resumed our trek. Our next stop was Sweetwater, Texas, where the Texas Highway Patrol, has a station close to the Interstate. I’ve always become guarded in my driving in and out of Sweetwater as it’s the place I’ve been ticketed for speeding—zooming east on I-20 from El Paso, the unguarded western stretch of interstate giving way to the heavily patrolled stretch approaching the town and beyond. At a Conoco station at the Texas Highway 70 exit off I-20; I fill the tank for $7.90—now those were the days, $0.50 a gallon. During the height of the gasoline shortages in 1972 there was no lack of gas in Texas as elsewhere, particularly California. From Sweetwater, the road west picks up speed, passing through Big Springs, Midland, and Odessa, our third rest stop.

From Odessa, I-20 rushes toward Pecos and beyond to its junction with Interstate 10 a few miles west—also its terminus as a freeway. En route we cross the Pecos River, the last stretch of water until the Rio Grande in El Paso. Beginning its climb into and over the Davis Mountains—with Guadalupe Peak, the highest point (8,751 feet) in Texas—this stretch of I-10 passes through a parched desert landscape of limestone and granite rocks and prickly pear cactus. I-10 is truly the road west; it literally ends at the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California. I-10 is also the road east to the Atlantic, terminating in Jacksonville, Florida. In my childhood, I-10 and its predecessor U.S. 90 carried my mother, father and sisters along the way between El Paso and Brooklyn, Mississippi in my dad’s 1952 four-door Oldsmobile. Of all the highways in this country I’ve put more miles on I-10 than any of the others. We stopped in Van Horn at Lomax Texaco for another 12 gallons that took us on into El Paso.

The two days, Sunday and Monday, we spent in El Paso with my parents and sisters were a mixture of happiness of my new job and sadness at our moving so much farther away. During the time we were in Dallas, we were a day’s drive—635 miles—or an hour airplane flight from El Paso—a trip we often made at major holidays and family gatherings. When we left this time we would be going nearly 1200 miles—a two-day drive but still only a two-and-a-half hour flight from San Jose. It was hard for my parents to believe that we would be regular visitors with that much distance between us. In the following years, we made the trip many times by car and by air. But the truth was that IM, the girls and I were going to start a new life, which meant we were leaving a past life behind. My life with my parents and the life I had with my new family were diverging and that was the natural order of things.

From El Paso, I-10 moves into the high desert of New Mexico beginning 40 miles north in Las Cruces, the interstate paralleling the entire 40 miles the Rio Grande River—the natural boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. The terrain west is a continuation of the desert west of the Davis Mountains. We stopped in Lordsburg, Phoenix, and finally settle in for the night in Blythe, California. In 1974, the stretch of I-10 through Phoenix was not complete and we ended up on surface streets that snaked around the city’s main downtown, a detour that took us over an hour to navigate. We would make the trip many times over the years afterwards and that stretch of I-10 would still be unfinished through the early 1980s—like a home improvement project that kept getting put off. We gained an hour traveling west just as we crossed the Colorado River and entered Blythe, California, a farming community hugging the river and the interstate, deriving life from both.

It was still warm, in the mid 80s Fahrenheit, when we arrived. The town is named after Thomas Blythe, who in the fall of 1882 spent $82,000 to divert a part of the Colorado River flow to irrigate a 40,000-acre wilderness area, which included a 40-acre farm. The 60-year old Blythe had a dream for an “Empire on the Colorado”. The dream would become a city 34 years later on July 21, 1916. We spent the night at the Best Western Tropics Motor Hotel off the US 95 Exit from I-10 at 9274 East Hobsonway, which parallels the freeway—a family of four for $25.44. It’s now a Days Inn. The Tropics would become our regular stop on our trips back and forth to El Paso in later years.

Wednesday morning October 9th 1974, we began the final leg of our journey west. Leaving Blythe we followed I-10 to Banning, where we gassed up at a Chevron station off the Interstate. Further down the freeway at San Bernardino, we picked up Interstate 15 north to Highway 395, which took us further north to Highway 58 at a junction called Four Corners. From there we headed west on 58 through the Mojave Desert, past Edwards Air Force base—the desert around us populated with Joshua trees, the symbol of the Mojave Desert, that early pioneers named after the biblical figure Joshua. Highway 58 took us through the town of Mojave across the Tehachapi pass, elevation 3793 feet, and on into Bakersfield. We were escorted along the way by numerous 18-wheelers—Bakersfield seeming to be one of their hangouts. We stopped for gas and a rest before turning north on Highway 99 to Highway 46 where we turned west and headed for Highway 101. It was late afternoon by the time we turned north again on 101, stopping at San Miguel to fill the car once more before the final run into the Bay Area.

It was late in the day on Wednesday by the time we arrive at the Holiday Inn off Lawrence Expressway in Sunnyvale—it’s now the Ramada Inn Silicon Valley. We checked into the motel that would become home for the next couple of weeks while we found a permanent place to stay. My new employer, Diablo Systems, then newly acquired by Xerox Corp., was picking up the tab for our living expenses while we got settled. We had arrived and our dream of one day living in Northern California was finally being realized. This was truly a new start and our life in Dallas, a distant memory, seemed a million miles away.