|
University Club (Contemporary), 800 Powell Street. Detail |
Horatio's
Drive: America's First Road Trip is acclaimed documentary filmmaker
Ken
Burns' 2003 account of the first transcontinental (SF to NY) expedition
by horseless carriage a century earlier. Nearly forty years before Bob
Hope and Bing Crosby took the Road to Singapore and fully eight decades
before Chevy Chase set out for Wally World in National Lampoon's Vacation,
Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson hit the road from San Francisco in a 1903 Winton
Touring Car. Three days earlier, on May 19, 1903, a debate over the reliability
of America's new horseless carriages had raged at the University Club.
Dr. Jackson, a 31 year-old retiree from Vermont, accepted a $50 bet that
he couldn't drive from the City to New York in 90 days. Dr. Jackson and
Sewall K. Crocker, a 22 year-old bicycle repairman, left San Francisco
at a time when there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire country.
Along the way, Jackson and Crocker picked up a mascot, a bulldog named
Bud. They arrived in New York on July 26 - 63 days after rolling out of
SF. What happened along the way can be described in its full breadth only
by PBS and master documentarian Ken Burns. Tom Hanks provides the voice
of Dr. Jackson. On June 17, 2003, Dr. Peter Kesling and his wife Charlene
pulled out of the driveway of the Mark Hopkins
Hotel in a 1903 Winton on a commemorative cross-country road trip sponsored
by General Motors. The Keslings reached their destination in New York on July 26.
Detail
I
|
Copyright 2003 Hank Donat |