The Times You Grew Up With

I was ten. My folks had an old Ford wagon and somehow scraped together enough for a few days in Big Bend. We drove out from Fort Worth with a cooler on the floor and the windows down because the air conditioning barely worked. We got there near sunset and everything had turned that deep Texas gold.

My dad stood at the overlook with one hand on the roof of the car, not saying much. My mom was beside him, holding her hair out of the wind. My brother and I were already asking about dinner.

They’re both gone now. I’ve been back twice. What I miss isn’t Big Bend. It’s the two of them standing there together.

Paul McAllisterThree hundred films about American places

Paul McAllister in his library, among the shelves. — Paul McAllister

Paul McAllister's mother and father at a desert overlook above a river, the family station wagon parked beside them. — My folks at the Big Bend overlook, 1966

That is why this book exists. Not for the places. For the afternoons you spend in them, with the people you have still got.

One hundred and sixteen places, across all fifty states. Big Bend is not one of them. These are the other kind: an hour from where you live, driven past your whole life, and you never knew.

116Places

50States

290Pages

100,000+Subscribers

The places

Cahokia. Bodie. Mackinac. A town the freedmen built.

Four of them, out of a hundred and sixteen.

A couple in 1970s clothes walking across the grass toward the terraced slope of Monks Mound at Cahokia. — **Cahokia Mounds**Illinois

A family in 1970s clothes walking up to the weathered timber Methodist church at Bodie, California. — **Bodie**California

A boy in 1970s clothes running ahead along the Grand Hotel porch on Mackinac Island, his father walking behind him, flags along the columns. — **Mackinac Island**Michigan

A family in 1970s clothes walking up to the white township hall at Nicodemus, Kansas, the flag flying above it. — **Nicodemus**Kansas

If two of those four mean nothing to you, that is the whole argument for this book.

The largest city in North America before Columbus, eight miles from St Louis. A gold town California holds exactly as it found it. An island where no car has passed the hotel porch since 1898. A town on the Kansas plains, founded by freedmen who were sold the prairie as farmland and arrived to find there was none.

Not one of them is hidden. Not one is closed. Nobody ever told you they were there.

✦

What you get out of it

A Saturday already decided, and a reason to ring somebody.
Something to tell them in the car. You arrive knowing what happened on the ground you are standing on.
An evening that costs nothing. One place a night, your own state first.
Being out in it again, with the people you have still got, before another summer goes.

II.

What is in it

Two pages a place. One takes you back, one takes you there.

The right page takes you back

A full page on what happened there and who was there when it did. Not the line on the plaque. The story the old-timers tell, and the reason the place still feels the way it did when you were small.

The left page takes you there

Where to stay, where to eat, and which road to take. Because the best part of these places was never only the place. It was the drive, and who was in the car with you.

At the front, eight road trips string the places together, the way a family used to plan a summer.

This is not a guidebook

A guidebook gives you opening hours and the price of a ticket. It ranks the top ten, walks you out through the gift shop, and every place in it reads like every other.

These are the places that had a soul and kept it: the hotel porch with the rocking chairs, the boardwalk stand, the town that still holds its homecoming every summer, the road that went somewhere before the interstate went past it. This book does not send you to see a building. It sends you back to a summer.

Nobody ever got homesick for a tour bus.

✦

The places, in the years you remember

Families at the places in this book, photographed at the time.

Families crowding Galveston's West Beach in 1973, cars parked on the sand and a surfboard rental stand. — **Galveston, Texas**Blair Pittman, EPA Documerica, National Archives · Public domain

A crowd under beach umbrellas watching a rocket lift off from Launch Complex 39 in 1975. — **Cape Canaveral, Florida**George C. White · CC0

Families climbing the stairs to look into the space capsules at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center in 1970. — **Huntsville, Alabama**J. Michael Scarborough · CC BY-SA 3.0

A crowd of shoppers and children with balloons at Pike Place Market around 1972. — **Seattle, Washington**Seattle Municipal Archives · CC BY 2.0

A grandmother, a small child and her father standing beside the Old Faithful Geyser sign at Yellowstone in June 1975. — **Yellowstone, Wyoming**Barbara Ann Spengler · CC BY 2.0

Children lined up in front of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway 500 gate in August 1970, families walking in behind them. — **Indianapolis, Indiana**David Wipf · CC BY 2.0

Before any of it was on a phone

People used to just go.

You were in the back seat, with a map in the glovebox that nobody could fold again afterwards. Your father said two hours and it was four. Somewhere along the way you stopped at a place with a hand-painted sign, because a man at the filling station said you had to. You could not tell anybody its name now. Only that it took forty minutes, and that you have never once forgotten it.

That is the part that really was better: the going. The country kept its half of the bargain. Most of those places are still standing, and somebody is still unlocking them in the morning.

Families on the beach at Atlantic City in 1978, umbrellas on the sand and the amusement piers behind. — **Atlantic City, New Jersey**John Margolies, Library of Congress · Public domain

Children riding bicycles and roller skating down a new street of houses in Oak Ridge in 1948. — **Oak Ridge, Tennessee**Ed Westcott, U.S. Department of Energy · Public domain

Two girls sitting on a cannon barrel at Fort McHenry, a boy climbing up behind them, the harbor beyond. — **Fort McHenry, Maryland**Jim Pickerell, EPA Documerica, National Archives · Public domain

Order the book

III.

What people say

What the first readers said.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

I’ve lived in Ohio most of my life and still found places in here I had never heard about. A few were surprisingly close to home.

Robert M.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Really enjoyed this. It reminded me how much history is tied to ordinary towns and roads we barely think about anymore. I would have loved more photographs of some of the places.

Walter H.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

I recognized quite a few of the places, but usually only by name. It was interesting finally learning what had actually happened there.

Dorothy B.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

I’m 70, and this brought back a lot of memories of places, roads, and towns from years ago. I also learned quite a bit along the way, though I did feel a few of the more interesting places deserved a deeper entry.

Richard C.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A very enjoyable collection. I kept stopping on places I thought I knew and realizing there was more to the story than I remembered.

Thomas W.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Well written and easy to pick up for a few pages at a time. It gave me a new appreciation for places I’ve passed without giving much thought to.

Margaret S.

Nobody was paid, and every review is printed as its author wrote it.

IV.

The questions

What people ask before they buy it.

“Is it a printed book?”

A PDF, laid out at 7 by 10 inches. You click the link in your email and it opens on any phone, tablet or computer, and it prints cleanly at home. You have it in sixty seconds rather than next week.

“I am never going to travel to any of these.”

Plenty of readers never do. The stories are the product and the directions are the bonus: one place a night, your own state first.

“I can find this on the internet for free.”

Some of it, mixed in with the version that is wrong, across forty tabs, with no way to tell which is true.

“Why should I trust what is in it?”

Every entry comes from the place’s own records, never from another guidebook, and everything was checked in 2026. Updates are free.

Order

Pick a place. Go Saturday.

The closest one is probably forty minutes away. Ring somebody who would come.

❖ Order form ❖

$19.99$34.99

Launch price · One payment · No subscription

Price rises in --:--:--

116 places across all fifty states, every one still there to visit
What really happened there, and what you can still see
116 photographs, thirty-four from the Library of Congress
Where to sleep, where to eat, and whether it is free
Eight road trips that string the places together
Find any place by state or by name
Free updates when things change

Buy now for $19.99

In your inbox within sixty seconds

VisaMastercardPayPalApple Pay