The 1971 Grateful Bread Truck Tour

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What’s the best summer you ever had?Mine was exactly 40 years ago, when two friends and I spent three months driving around the United States and Canada. Although in 1971 we were four years removed from the Summer of Love, the spirit of that phenomenon was still in the air. But rather than converge on a single location like Haight-Ashbury, we decided to take the countercultural pulse of the entire country by circumotoring it.Although we intended to travel frugally, the trip would take a chunk of change. To that end, I got a second-shift job at Whirlpool a month before spring semester of my sophomore year in college ended, and those workman’s wages were enough to fund my share of a 1951 Ford Taystee bread truck, which Steve Eckstrom, Pete Bergeson and I turned into a poor man’s Winnebago. When school was out, we headed north to Canada, then east to the Atlantic, south to Florida, west to Arizona and California, north to Washington, and then east again, arriving back in St. Continue Reading