Courtesy: Federal Highway Administration
The difficulties of the San Diego route are illustrated by an anecdote included in Albert D. Manchester’s Trails Begin Where Rails End (Trans-Anglo Books, 1987). He described a 1910 trip by Harold Collyer (20 years old) and Bud Price (about the same age) in a Ford Model T. A portion of the trip, as narrated by Manchester, follows the route of future U.S. 80 in the Southwest:
The boys left home [a farm in west Texas] with five gallons of gasoline, five gallons of water, and couple of gallons of oil tied to the running boards. They carried enough tools to open up a repair garage anyplace along the way. Shovel, axe, and camping gear were tied on. Spare tires and desert bags (drinking water) were attached wherever else they could find room. Full of bacon and biscuits, they chattered [sic] away from home on a cool morning.
It was still quite hot when they pulled into Deming, New Mexico, late that night, out of water, almost out of gasoline, and tired right down to the bone marrow from shoveling sand. The day had taught them one thing about desert travel: get an early start, even before the sun comes up; get down the road a ways before the day heats up. Relax in the middle of the day, if you have to. Travel again in the evening. Summertime in the Southwest is an unhealthy time of the year to be shoveling sand under the midday sun. They bought tarps to throw under the tires, for traction over soft sand.
Two or three days later they showed up in Tucson, where they had to replace a tire; sand and heat were already hard at work on the Ford. They drove through Gila and Yuma, places that have their own brand of summer heat . . . . When they had to repair tires along the road, they tied the tarp to the car, staked the other end of the tarp to the ground, and worked in the shade . . . .
After they crossed the Colorado River into California, they ran into deep sand. The Ford ground away through the sand, gulping water for relief. At last they came to the famous wooden road that had been put down over the dunes. The road was just wide enough for one car, but wider places had been built into the road every mile or so in order to let one car pass another. Harold and Bud didn’t meet anybody.
When they fueled up in El Centro, they learned that the road over the hills to San Diego was so rough and steep that their T might not make it. Gasoline was fed to the T carb by gravity; going uphill, gas just might not feed to the carb properly if the road happened to be too steep. Some drivers solved the problem by backing uphill, but when you were climbing a steep, narrow, winding mountain road that climbed for several miles, such a tactic could prove impractical. Harold and Bud solved that problem by stationing Bud out on a fender with a can of gasoline. He poured gas into the carburetor at just the right intervals to keep the car going. It was a risky business because Bud was in danger of falling off the car–it was a rough road–or accidentally pouring gasoline all over the engine and possibly starting a fire that would destroy their car.
They pulled out on top at Jacumba, 4,000 feet above sea level and fifteen degrees cooler. It felt so good up there they decided to camp under a big tree while they worked on the car, cleaning it and greasing it, and going over it with their tools to tighten anything that had vibrated loose. This was a common chore with the early drivers. The cars vibrated a good bit all by themselves, but after bouncing all over bad roads for a week or so, they could be in need of tender attention with wrenches and screwdriver.
After camping in San Diego, Harold and Bud drove to Los Angeles before turning east. They took a northern route into Arizona, but eventually picked up future U.S. 80 in New Mexico.
The rest of the trip was comparatively uneventful. Just steady driving through sand and dust and mud, fixing a flat now and then for a break in the routine. They drove through Lordsburg, Deming, Las Cruces, El Paso. And home. All the tires were worn out. The car had about five hundred new rattles. (It should be remembered that a lot of wood was used in car bodies before the 1930s, and especially in the arid Southwest, the bodies would loosen up.) But they just cleaned the car, ground the valves, tightened her up . . . and she was about as good as a T could ever get.