Historic Moments by George Chevallier

The Sunday Ride

(The picture above of the 1934 Ford is from a brochure my father picked up at a Ford dealer in Buffalo, NY in 1934 back in the days when the appearance of the new year models was a big event.)

From the beginning of the era when most families owned an automobile, there was born a family tradition known as “the Sunday ride”.

I remember my mother telling me about the rides she had when she was young. She usually carried a friend with her and, for them to see as much as they did in one afternoon, was a marvel of the time. This would have been in the 1920’s and before the Great Depression, so things were booming around the Eastern Shore. This Sunday afternoon activity was to continue until about 1954 for most Americans. By this time, there were so many more activities available to the average American family to occupy their Sunday afternoons. Things such as organized sports leagues, more traffic on the road and last, but not least, television became much more attractive to people than “just riding around in the car” until 3:30 when the “good programs” would be playing on the radio. But, before all this, the chance to get away from it all and see wondrous sights in the country was the absolute best thing to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Of course, there was always a down side and that is where I contributed to our weekly family outing in the 1940’s. I had two great fears and never let my Dad have that nice, peaceful ride. I was forever asking if he really knew where we were and did we have enough gas to get home. I don’t know why these concerned me to the extent that it did. He never got lost and never ran out of gas, but I persisted in asking these questions on a regular basis. Everyone else enjoyed the scenery, the farm animals and the new development taking place in and around Salisbury. After a while, they just learned to ignore the five year old nervous wreck in the back seat. Eventually, I learned how to read the gas gauge and a map and never had the problem again.