The Bicycling Bobs: A Journey Around America

By Daniel Sommerfeldt

After twelve years of school, many young people have an urge to do something new and different. They want to see the world before they embark on their future as adults.

My father, Bob Sommerfeldt, was one of those people. After he graduated from high school in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in the fall of 1939, he and his good friend, also named Bob, decided to take a bike trip to visit Bob's sister in Seattle, Washington. It turned out to be an eight-month trip around the entire circumference of the continental United States.

This book is a record of an eighteen-year-old's first adventure into the world. It gives a tiny window on the world of a very different time in our history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781794718784

Book preview

Dedication

To Maggie

The person who started this ball rolling

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Margaret Sommerfeldt whose inadvertent comment at a family dinner motivated me to begin this work after years of its neglect in a closet. I want to thank Jamie Kikolla and Anita Mares for their encouragement to keep writing, Quentin Wiley for assistance in some internet searches and, finally, Meg Boomer who provided very helpful suggestions on how to structure an eighteen-year-old’s diary into a more readable format.

Of course, I take responsibility for the contents of this book and any errors or omissions are mine.

Preface

After twelve years of school, many young people have an urge to do something new and different. They want to see the world before they embark on their future as adults. Dad was one of those people. After he graduated from high school in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in the fall of 1939, he and his good friend, Bob Lyneis, decided to take a bike trip to visit Bob Lyneis’s sister in Seattle, Washington. It turned out to be an eight-month trip around the circumference of the continental United States.

Dad was always proud of his adventure. As a professional journalist, he wrote some articles about his trip for his newspaper, The Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, but it never went beyond that. He didn’t brag about his trip but was always eager to show someone his scrapbook, his maps or talk about his trip if they showed some interest. One of my great failures is that I showed little interest. Although it was only twenty-some years prior, for a kid like me it seemed like ancient history: My God, dad, that happened before World War 2!

Dad passed away in 1999. I was left with a banker’s box full of his two diaries, maps, a scrapbook, miscellaneous newspapers from around the country, some letters and postcards and various notes he wrote in later years. Whether he ever intended to write a book or not is going to be an unsolved mystery. The notes he left were few and not well organized. There was no outline or anything similar to a book format. They could very well be notes for the articles he had written or future short articles.

The banker’s box sat in a closet for twenty years with a mental note to myself that I should do something with that information someday. Well, that someday came in late 2019. Over a meal with some family members, the topic of discussion went to trips and traveling. The subject came up that my dad had taken a bike trip around the country when he was young. There seemed to be a lot of interest in the topic. Now, the show of interest may have been just out of courtesy but it was the spark that I really do need to do something with that banker’s box. So, I thought this was the time to see what was there.

After going through all the material, I found that it was a teenager’s record of a bygone world. They did things that would be unheard of today. Sometimes they were good little Catholic boys. Other times they were entrepreneurs, hobos, panhandlers and, by today’s standard, even petty criminals. They had no support crew, no cell phones, no GPS and no sophisticated equipment. It was two teenagers on a lark. Although they bicycled a majority of the time, they also got an occasional ride from a trucker. Sometimes, they just hung onto the back of a passing truck. In Texas, the railroad also gave them an unplanned ride.

Dad was a budding journalist, which he later chose as his career. He recorded his trip in a daily diary.  For an eighteen-year-old, he took meticulous notes. It is actually more of a travelogue than a diary. There were no personal reflections, just a recording of the day’s events. In fact-checking his entries, I was surprised at their accuracy. With the exception of a few misspellings and confusing dolphins with porpoises, everything checked out. For a kid from the Midwest who had never seen salt water before, mistaking dolphins for porpoises in the Gulf Coast such an error is understandable. There are no porpoises in the Gulf Coast.

Another thing that surprised me was the tolerance of people they encountered. They got shooed out and scolded at times but they never got in real trouble. They often slept in police stations and fire houses. People were basically generous with food, money and providing places to sleep. In how many places now could you be allowed to sleep in a boxcar and have the night watchman wake you up at a time you asked?

The war in Europe was raging. Stories of Nazi advances were next to a story about the Bicycling Bobs. No one seemed concerned; it was a European war. Dad noted the movement of military equipment but not once did he mention or reflect on the war.

This was a difficult book for me to write. It wasn’t for personal reasons but rather that my first two books were technical philosophy, A Precis of Natural Systems and A Disquisition on Natural Systems. This was a big change in subject matter. It took many false starts for this not to read like a dissertation. I hope I at least partially succeeded in my task.

Although this book is a record of past events, I don’t consider it a history but rather the record of an eighteen-year-old’s first adventure into the world. It gives a tiny window on the world of a very different time in our country. I hope you find it enjoyable.

Introduction

This book is based on my dad’s daily diary entries, the maps he used, contemporary newspaper clippings and the available correspondence. It is divided into five major sections: the westward trip to see Bob Lyneis’s sister in Seattle, Washington, the trip south down the Pacific coast, the journey eastward to Florida along the Gulf Coast, the trip north along the Atlantic coast and the trip back home.

The indented quotations are from his daily diary entries from August 21, 1939 until his return home on May 1, 1940. They follow in chronological order but are not usually identified by date. Dad often made mention of one day’s activities in subsequent days. Although I made every effort to relate each day’s activities in his own words, I did add text for easier reading. Space limitations in his diary often forced him to use sentence fragments rather than complete sentences. The space for each entry was confined to a two and one-half by four-inch area.¹ On rare occasions, he did exceed this limit but, for the most part, he stayed within its boundaries. On January 1, 1940, dad bought a new diary at Woolworth’s for twenty-five cents that allowed for a full page per day which he promptly filled.

The diary entries contained virtually no personal reflections or opinions but they included his daily activities such as what he ate, when he washed his clothes or clipped his toenails. The routine chores were generally omitted. I also omitted references of letters he wrote and received that no longer exist or there was no mention of their content.

During his lengthy winter stay in San Francisco, dad stayed in a firehouse, worked for a messenger service and sold Christmas cards. He had numerous dental appointments and also did some sight-seeing. He made detailed entries of these routine activities. These entries were omitted as well unless they were unusual.

Mail delivery was infrequent and was scheduled by the Bobs through General Delivery at post offices in cities they planned to visit. Aside from a few personal letters, most of the mail consisted of dad sending unwanted clothes and receiving replacement clothes and money orders sent by his mother from his bank account in Fond du Lac. As you will read, it wasn’t a perfect system.

The Bicycling Bobs got frequent press coverage. The coverage was the generally the stock newspaper interview: names, ages, where they were from, what they were carrying and what their plans were. I included only a few where new or unusual information about them was printed.

Aside from a few, nearly identical press photos, there are no pictures of their trip. The Bobs didn’t carry a camera.  Cameras take up too much valuable space on a bike, are an added expense, and developing the film took time.

The map segments are from his original maps that track the diary entries. The Bicycling Bobs kept mainly to major highways because the road conditions were better. With the advent of the Interstate Highway System, some of these highways no longer exist or have different orientations than in 1939. The stars along the route indicate the locations where they spent a night. The reader can follow along as their adventure takes them around the country.

Prologue

On June 9, 1939 my dad, Bob Sommerfeldt, and his friend, Bob Lyneis, graduated from Goodrich High School in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Dad was involved in many extracurricular activities. The four most notable were his bicycling interest, his two journalistic interests and his religious activities.

Dad was an active member of the YMCA bicycle club. Dad took long bicycling trips with other members of this group around Wisconsin. It was not unusual for club members to make bicycle trips of hundreds of miles, camping in parks and recreational areas.

Dad was also the editor for the high school newspaper, the Hi-Eye. These duties involved editing the newspaper, writing copy, and exchanging papers and notes with other high school newspapers in the area.

Another journalistic activity was his work as the senior high school correspondent for the local newspaper, the Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter. Dad reported on various activities that took place at school such as sports events, plays and dances and submitting articles about them for the newspaper.

Dad was also the Chief Squire for the local chapter of The Columbian Squires. The Columbian Squires is an international youth fraternity run by the Knights of Columbus for Catholic boys between the ages of ten and eighteen.

All of these activities would come in handy on their forthcoming journey.

Growing up during the Great Depression, the family had little money. Dad earned income by selling magazine subscriptions to local residents through the Road Subscription Service located in Boston, Mass. He had a rather large clientele selling magazines such as The Post, Radio Guide, Lady’s Home Journal, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping among others.

He was also the district representative for the Economy Print Shop in Gary, Indiana. The company was run by his relative, Frank McGinty. Dad’s job was to solicit orders for such things as business cards and forms that people and companies used. He would send the orders to the Print Shop and deliver them to the customer when they arrived.

On Saturdays, dad worked at Weiss’ Meat Market on Main Street in Fond du Lac. He would do odd jobs around the market, cleaning, sweeping, killing chickens and delivering orders on his bike. He earned two-dollars a day for his work.

The adventure began on July 21 1939, when Bob Lyneis proposed a bicycle trip to California. They also discussed the possibilities of cycling East or South instead of West. The final decision was made on August 2 to cycle out West. Bob Lyneis had relatives in Seattle so there was some rationale for the trip West. The initial plan they settled on appeared to be that after the visit in Seattle, they would go southward to San Francisco with a return through