Stops Along the Way by L. Brent Bozell III

Author:L. Brent Bozell III [Bozell, L. Brent III]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642939255
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-09-23T14:36:05+00:00

Section III

Road Trip

Okay, so one final adventure in Spain.

This story first was made public in a most unusual way on the most unexpected platform.

Americans have enjoyed efficient phone service for over a century.

Not so in Spain. In the 1970s phones were still a luxury. Your phone might or might not work, which often was irrelevant since the odds were pretty strong that the party with which you wanted to communicate didn’t have a phone. A call overseas was even more precarious. You had to request an international line and be by the phone when the opportunity presented itself. The quality was awful, and the rates were astronomical, so the calls had to be kept short. This was rarely an issue since the call was usually dropped before you were finished.

If ever there was an urgency, the only recourse was the good old-fashioned telegram. Looking back, I can’t believe we actually had to send them. Stop. Keeping words to minimum. Stop. Costing fortune. End. If there was no urgency, we wrote letters. We had my father’s portable Royal typewriter, and on weekends one of us could be found at the living room desk, coffee in hand, hammering away with a letter to our parents, and less frequently, to siblings and friends. Letters were typed on the ubiquitous thin, rough, yellow typing paper, of which we had a seemingly endless supply.

The correspondence was usually several pages long because there was so much material to cover. It would take at least a week for a letter to wing its way across the ocean, and at least that long for its reply to find its way back. Taking into account the time it would take to produce the letter, it boiled down to about one exchange per month with our parents. That was it. The other lifelines to news about the mother country were our subscriptions to our parents’ Triumph, our uncle’s National Review, and Time, a magazine that once mattered. Given the limited access to information, we gleefully devoured every article in every issue when each arrived.

Tim Baker and I had met in Detroit in December of 1972 when his sister Mary was wed to my brother Chris. Tim was in his second year at the University of Dallas, and I was in my final year of high school with the intention of enrolling at UD thereafter. At some point during the wedding festivities I’d met Tim’s classmates, Mike Cochran and Joe Stahler. They would all be spending the following semester in Rome participating in UD’s overseas studies program. We agreed to rendezvous there. The plan called for me to find a way to Rome during our spring break, after which the four of us would travel together back to Spain for Holy Week.

Four months later it was time to pull the trigger on the proposed expedition. I had exactly five dollars to my name, but Tim had assured me that if I made my way to Rome, he’d take care of expenses for the trip back, so what the hell.

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