Decker Trip - Panamerican Highway 1966

INTRODUCTION (by Ken Decker)

"If you ask me, I think you're plain nuts!" That was the plainly spoken opinion of my sister-in-law when she realized we were serious about driving from New York to Brazil with our family of ten. And to tell the truth, before we got started, I sometimes felt that I agreed with her.
Not that the idea was new to me. I had thought I'd like to make the trip at least fifteen years previously, but this time the idea had a few more things going for it. For one, I knew from information furnished by the Pan American Union that the Inter-American Highway through Central America was opened up all the way to the Panama Canal, and that any breaks in the Panamerican Highway in South America could be detoured. The major break (the Canal) we knew would have to be skirted by boat. Second, our family had grown to such a size that even if the cost of such a trip were a lot more than we calculated, it could still be cheaper than flying everybody down to Brazil. In the year we had been in the U.S., two of the children had passed from half-fare to full-fare status. Third, as returning missionaries, we were very much interested in taking back a vehicle for our work in Brazil. By driving down, the costs of transportation of the vehicle would be absorbed in the cost of the trip. Fourth, the older kids, at least, were now old enough to benefit socially and educationally from such an adventure.
And adventure it was! One of the pamphlets we read on the condition of the highway said that even the trip to Panama should be considered an expedition. That must not have been meant to reassure anybody. But we did have some concrete facts to go on. Eleven years earlier, our colleagues the James Orrs had made the trip from southern Brazil to Canada in five months. They drove a Land Rover jeep, and also had their seven children with them. Though we weren't going to be driving anything in the jeep class, we knew the road had improved considerably since they had gone over it. Then about a month before we started, I heard that another missionary friend of ours had just arrived in Bolivia by land. Though the information he sent me on the highway was very sketchy (they had been held up in Barranquilla, Colombia, for nine days, and the roads are rough mostly in Colombia) we were encouraged just to know that he had made it through. I never found out how long it took them, but knew that the vehicle used was some special three-quarter ton pickup.
The reassurance we picked up from the Herschel Dunn family's trip was mitigated by the fact that we knew our equipment was strictly non-special. We were going to be driving a 1965 Ford Falcon Club Wagon
[this isn't our van--just one that looks exactly like it] with the small 105 horsepower, six cylinder engine. No special transmission, suspension, carburation. Nothing. Well, almost nothing. Because of the heavy load we took from California to New York in 1965, I had had full-length extra weight leafs put on the four (heavy duty) springs by Sears Roebuck in Pasadena. That was the only tning on the car that could be called special. Then, to make things a bit less assuring, we were going to be hauling--besides a full load in the wagon--a small home-made camping trailer. This trailer--with the baggage in it--weighed a thousand pounds.
I wanted to take a heavy-duty model of the Club Wagon, but when we arrived from South America in May of 1965, it wasn't easy to get just what you wanted without having to wait weeks and maybe even months for it. We needed a vehicle right away, so we took what we could get. Before we got into Mexico with it, there were more than 41 thousand miles on the odometer--the result of three and a half times across the U.S. Not exactly a new wagon, but at least I knew everything that had been done to it.
Before leaving the country, I bought some spare parts, as every pamphlet suggested. Points, spark plugs, fuel pump, carburetor, rotor and cap for distributor, coil, condenser, voltage regulator, front wheel bearings, and bearings for the trailer wheels. Of course, we took along a fair set of mechanic's tools, a small can of bearing grease, grease gun, some contact cement, a tubeless tire repair kit, and a couple cans of STP and upper cylinder lube.
The equipment we were most worried about were the tires. We knew we would ride over several thousand miles of gravel and that poor tires could mean a lot of delay and expense on the road. Before going to the west coast for the last time, I bought some six-ply rated Sears Roebuck tires. These held out until we got out west, then one by one they started getting ply separation, and it wasn't until the third one went out near Phoenix, Arizona, that we found out what was probably causing the separation: low tire pressure. The Sears man there suggested forty pounds instead of 34, and from then on we didn't get as much as a flat tire on the car for the entire trip.
The combination camper-luggage trailer was made entirely from plywood, bolted onto a Sears utility trailer frame which came complete with eight-inch wheels and tires. This frame is rated by the company for fifty miles-per-hour and a thousand pounds.
I felt something like Noah while I was building the trailer. I taught at Houghton College, Houghton, N.Y., during the school year, and we lived in a large white house at the north end of the small town. Our house faced New York highway no.19. With borrowed tools, I began cutting and assembling the plywood on our front porch. Then, when some of the larger pieces were glued and screwed together, I had to move onto the front lawn. People driving by wondered what was going on, and a number stopped to ask. By the time the kids were let out of grade school a month after commencement at the College, we were almost set to go. Trial and error method and the other many things that had to be done besides making the trailer, contributed toward making it such a long job. And even when we moved our things to Welland, Ontario, on the first of July, we still had to figure out just exactly how we were going to put in the side canvass and screens.
The trailer was roughly a box six feet wide by seven and a half feet long. Two full-length tops hinged near the bottom of the box opened up and out, forming an A-type roof. The lenghtened ends extended the inside dimensions when opened, so that we had room for two plywood beds with a two-foot walkway between them. Under the beds, we were able to carry an assortment of baggage, cooking utensils, and spare tires. After a few times, Gordon and I could put the thing up all ready in less than five minutes.

Before getting too far on our venture, I needed a trial run of car and trailer. We had to be in North Carolina for two weeks of conference of our mission at Winston-Salem. This was near enough to the mountains to make us decide that this would be our shakedown cruise. We would be going to Ruth's home in Detroit after the conference, and a ride over the Great Smoky Mountains was about the closest we could come to mountains in the eastern U.S. This shakedown cruise gave me a couple of those moments of almost agreeing with my sister-in-law.
We left Welland after they stopped killing everybody on the highway over the Fouth of July. On our way south, we stopped in Houghton for last good-byes and to pick up mail. Then on to Binghamton, N.Y., the Philadelphia area, and Washington, D.C., visiting friends. At Wabanna Camp, on the Chesapeake, we got a good scare. Magali, our next-to-youngest, fell nine feet off a sea wall onto some sharp rocks. The kids who were with her almost went hysterical. When I jumped down to where she was, I found her unconscious and bleeding from the head. I though she was dead, but she came to in a little while, and x-rays in Annapolis showed no serious damage. A few stitches fixed things up except for a headache.
We stayed in Norfolk a few days visiting with Ruth's brother and sister-in-law, Lt. Comdr. Siegfried Fink and wife. From there, it was an easy drive to Winston-Salem, where, between meetings of the conference, we did some more work on the canvasses of our trailer.
We hadn't gotten thirty miles from W.S. on the day after the close of the conference when I felt the trailer bouncing as if it had a flat tire. In the mirror, I could see that it was whipping around dangerously on the narrow highway, but I wasn't prepared for what had happened. At first, we couldn't see what was wrong. Both tires were perfectly okay. Then I saw that the left wheel--the entire wheel--had broken away from its hub. If the wheel hadn't moved inward toward the springs rather than out and off, we probably would have demolished the trailer as well as put ourselves in danger of a bad accident. We thanked God for His protection. But at the same time, we tried to figure what could have caused it. We knew that before getting to Washington we had been 200 pounds overweight in the trailer, but a shift in the load had remedied that, and the bearings were not heating. We figured it was a flaw, and Sears agreed with us, though a bit grudgingly. Our mail-order spare wheel had not gotten to us yet, so we had to spend a half day going to Greensboro with a friend to get another one.
The next day we got to the mountains, our next test. I was already nervous about the trailer wheels, and now I began to find out that the car didn't have very much power in the hills. At less than six thousand feet, we had to gear down to first on some climgs, and at a place where I stopped on a slight upgrade, I couldn't get the car in motion again (I had to turn it around a bit and get some momentum downhill). What would it be in Costa Rica where we had to go over the mountains at eleven thousand feet, and maybe higher yet in the Andes? What would I do it this were to happen on some deserted gravel highway in Ecuador?
I decided then that I had to find out how to give the car more pep in the higher altitudes. They must do something to them when they send them for use in Colorado, say. But neither in Detroit nor in Gary could I get a positive answer. Someone in Detroit suggested that I use the carbureter for the larger engine on this smaller one. I got one, and found out in Gary that it couldn't even be fastened to the intake maniforl (in California I traded it for one the right size). It was in Laramie, Wyoming, that I found out what they do for the altitude. You put a smaller sized gas intake jet in the carburetor and advance the timing. The Ford agency in Laramie sold me a three-thousandths smaller jet (which I didn't put in until in Colombia), and before leaving California, I had the timing advanced four degrees.
We considered Detroit sort of our official starting point because it was there that we worked out the final arrangements of the packing of the car and trailer. This was largely due to one of the important, perhaps the most important, decisions made prior to the actual trip through Latin America. Sieg and Pat flew up in a rented plane from Norfolk with their two children to spend a last weekend with the rest of the family in Detroit. Pat had asked before (in Norfolk) if we didn't want her to keep Laurie, our one-year-old, but we had decided against it on account of the difficulties involved in getting her to us in South America. The matter came up again in Detroit, and was again decided against. Then at the airport, a few minutes before they took off for Norfolk, it came up again. In an excruciating last-minute decision, Ruth decided to let Pat take Laura. It was rather vaguely decided that Pat would take a trip to South America and take Laura when we got settled down in our new field of service. Just like that. Pat climbed into the little Apache, Ruth handed over the baby, and away they went.
I consider that decision to have made the difference between a pleasant trip down and a nightmare.
We sent all Laurie's clothes and diapers to Norfolk, and took down the folding crib from where we had it piled on top of the luggage between the front seats and second seats. When set up, it almost touched the roof of the car, and blocked effective communication between the front and rear seats, between the strap and lawlessness.
Those days in Detroit were in part a family reunion of Ruth's side of the family. John and Rita Fink were there from California, Stewart and Margaret Eby, Ruth's sister and brother-in-law, live in Bloomfield Hills, less than an hour's drive from St. Clair Shores, where the parents, Mr. and Mrs. Christian Fink, were living then. And George and Carol, another brother and sister-in-law, lived only a little bit farther away in Ann Arbor.

On August 19, we left Detroit for Gary, Indiana, stopping overnight at Ann Arbor for a last visit with George and Carol. Next day we had a picnic lunch together at the riverside park. Before we left, Ruth surreptitiously put a can of bacon she'd just bought into George and Carol's Volkswagen as a gift. George discovered it and, thinking she had forgotten it, started to chase us. While he raced out to the expressway, we were leisurely getting gas in the city. We were just pulling out of a truck weighing station on the ex-way, when we heard George yelling at us and running across the highway. He had gotten as far as the outskirts of Jackson before deciding to turn around, and just happened to spot us at the weighing station!
In Gary, we stayed with Joe and Gloria Davis, colleagues in the mision. Joe is a good mechanic, and I had planned to do our mechanical check-out with him. He overhauled the carburetor, went over the ignition system, packed the front wheel bearings, and changed the oil seal on the transmission box. We tried to get a higher ratio differential, but found out that this particular wagon had been fitted with the highest that Ford made for it. To fool with the transmission would have cost too much, so we just left well enough alone. It was here that we took out the weight bolted in on top of the gas tank. This is a piece of cast iron weighing about 120 pounds--equal to two kids. We also covered the bottom side of the gas tank with rubber sheets cut from a truck innertube--as per a suggestion we read somewhere--to prevent gas tank puncture from flying gravel.
We were ten days in Gary, much longer than we had expected to stay. We visited friends in Indianapolis, went to Chicago to see about documents (visas), and even spent a night with Margaret and her children at the Dunes State Park near Gary. When our AAA documents for South American customs had not arrived after ten days, we decided we had to leave anyway. We were already way behind our original schedule, and the documents could be sent direclty to california.
Even though we were rushing our way to california, we had a good trip. The trailer had its initiation to rain at whitewater State Park near Rochester Minnesota. During the night, it poured, but inside the camper everything stayed dry. Even then, I knew that getting water in the trailer would not be as bad as not being able to get over the Rockies.
Our original plan was to go through Denver, where we had some friends we wanted to see. But I had been that way before and knew the passes west of the city. Frankly, I was afraid of them. We had made them before with the wagon loaded down, but now we had a trailer in addition. I chickened out and decided to try the lower crossing through southern Wyoming. I was told this route also had gentler grades, and that was what we were needing. In places we had to go real slow, but made it without problems. I made sure not to stop on upgrades.
As we arrived in Cheyenne, before getting into the city, I stopped to gas up at a gas station. The chief attendant was a clean-cut, all-American drop-out type kid. After I got my change int he office, I asked him what they did to put some zip into cars at that altitude.
"It's a matter of regulating the jet screws," he answered.
"But just what do you do?" I pressed.
"If you want me to do it for you, I can, but I'm not going to tell you how to do it."
I was taken aback by his fruffness, but at the same time rather amused that he should guard so strongly such a small secret. I told him we were on our way to South America and wanted to know for future reference, that I didn't want it dcone just then. He got even more surly. "Look, what you want is to get my know-now without having to pay for it. If you want me to do it, it's going to cost you money."
In view of that attitude, I just thanked him and walked out. I got a lot more cooperation in Laramie.
From Wyoming to Los Angeles, it was all down hill--literally. except for the San Bernardino Hills with their long grades and a strong headwing that kept us in second gear a lot.
We stayed at John and Rita's home in Torrance for sixteen days--our last prolonged stop in the U.lS. The time was spent visiting friends and relatives int hea rea, getting more visas, and shopping for "encargos:" small, hard-to-get items which people in S.A. wanted us to take down for them. Part of Ruth's entry int he log reads, "We had a wonderful time at Johnie's. They were perfect hosts and made us feel really welcome. The kids took turns sleeping in the camper in the garage..." (everywhere we went where there were kids, it was the novelty to sleep in the camper, even if it was just in the driveway). John's kids didn't start school until the Wednesday after we arrived. We drove out to Knott's Berry Farm and met Don there (Don Decker, my brother, whom we saw often during this time).
Ruth did some portraits, and Hohn and I took the kids to the ocean for swimming.
On September 26 we left Torrance. We took our time, stopping to do laundry, visint friends in Phoenix, Arizona, and spending a morning at Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. In the afternoon of the 29th we got into El Paso, our gateway to Mexico, and immediately checked in at the Border Office of the AAA for information. They informed us that the road from Eagle Pass was newer and less mountainous. At the same time I bought the insurance for Mexico for the propposed duration of our stay in the country. This is obligatory, as the Mexican government will not recognize anything but Mexican insurance. A slight jog out of the direct route from El Paso to Eagle Pass made it possible to see Carlsbad Caverns. It would have been worth even a longer detour.
As we were breaking camp near Balmorhea, Texas, on the morning of the 30th, we saw a huge cloud growing to the northwest. Gordon was till hitching the trailer when it hit us--the first dust storm
any of us had ever seen. And we saw plenty of it! It followed us until early afternoon, in places cutting visibility to less than a hundred feet during the first hour.
We got into Eagle Pass just before the stores closed. We were still able to stock up on some groceries which we thought would be unavailable south of the border, such as cold cereals, sauce mixes, and cool-aid. We did our laundry in what turned out to be the last laundromat we saw, and I bought several cans of STP (not the last time we saw it).