My father may well have been the bravest man I’ve ever known. He weathered the Great Depression, fought in World War II and faced down the Russians in the Cold War. However, these early acts of courage paled in comparison to what he did in 1963. In the summer of that year he loaded his family into a second hand Studebaker station wagon and started out on a summer-long road trip that would take us from upstate New York to California and back.

We began our journey on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and ended up on the New York State Thruway, but in those days four-lane, limited access highways were the exception rather than the rule.