Blog 3471 – 05.05.2025

A Little Traveling Music, Please

In all my travels I have found great comfort in music. My first car was a 1957 Ford Standard with a radio that only picked-up AM stations, but fortunately for me in nineteen sixty-seven my hometown, Chattanooga, Tennessee had two AM stations that played Rock ‘n Roll. More than a few of my peers listened to Country-Western music as most of their parents did. But for me, Elvis, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and a host of other bands now mostly forgotten lit up the airwaves and rocked that little two-door, six-cylinder, three-speed on the column marvel of mid-fifties automobile technology.

When I joined the Army on my eighteenth birthday in November of 1968, having already graduated high school in June of that year, I gave my Ford to my brother. Robert was sixteen and a sophomore in high school back then.

After eight weeks of Basic Training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and a six-month Teletype Repair course at the Southeast Army Signal School at Fort Gordon Georgia, then four-months held over at my training company working as a clerk while I awaited a security clearance, I received orders to go home for a two-week leave then report to the Oakland Army Depot for processing to South Vietnam.

As the war was winding down in 1970, guys who arrived in January got a one month Christmas drop off their one year tours so I was home for Christmas. Shortly after returning stateside I went shopping for a new used car and bought a 1967 Chevelle Malibu. It was canary yellow with a black vinyl top. And it came complete with a 357 cubic-inch short block V8 engine, bucket seats, automatic transmission, and a AM/FM radio to which I listened on my first long road trip. I made that first long drive after a month long leave as I drove to my final duty station in the Army, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I made several trips back and forth during my final ten-months of active duty military service.

Over the years since I have owned a number of different vehicles and went from an AM radio only to AM/FM, then with added 8 Track players, tape decks, CD players. My current ride is a pick-up that I bought new in 2015, a Ram 1500 short-bed Tradesman with four-wheel-drive, 5.7 Liter Hemi-Engine and a wonderful sound system that can play music from my smartphone or from a zip-drive. I have hundreds of songs recorded on several zip-drives that I have listened to over and over again as I have logged over one hundred and seventy thousand miles on my Ram 1500.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

I love a good road trip. Most every week for the last six months I have been making the almost three hour drive from Houston to our property near Bon Wier, Texas and back, but not without a little traveling music please.

David James White

A Little Travelling Music, Please

A Little Travelling Music, Please

A Little Traveling Music, Please