British College Students Visit Vermilion – August 1962

Remember my post about the two young Canadians who were bicycling around Lake Erie back in April 1961? They were passing through Vermilion when the Journal caught up with them. I did a two-part post about them back here.

Well, here's a similar scenario in which a pair of British college students were hitchhiking around the United States and passed through – where else? – Vermilion, where they were briefly staying with a couple with whom they were familiar through a relative back home. The article below ran in the Journal on August 21, 1962.

As usual, it's interesting seeing things from the perspectives of the young travellers, named Mika Hosier and Clive Seward. As the article notes, "The things that have seemed the most impressive and different to the boys are the temperature, the roads, the immediate friendliness of the American people and the great hurry everyone is in.

"The boys say that the roads in England are mostly small two-lane ones and that they have only one stretch of road comparable to our turnpikes. They say that here you can walk into a restaurant and most people will talk to you but to try it in England would be a quite different story. They have observed that we are always rushing around to go someplace and think that we have forgotten how to relax.

"Another thing that puzzles the boys is the speed limits on the freeways and turnpikes. "In England," they say, "the roads are not nearly so good yet we have speed limits only in towns and densely populated areas. The same amount of people are killed as without speed limits and on such beautiful highways we can't see the need of them. You can kill yourself at forty as easily as eighty."

"In hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles, the boys met many wonderful people and have had many new experiences. One night they slept on the desert because they couldn't get a ride. One man who picked them up in Springfield was surprised that they spoke English so well and took them to meet his family. The boys stayed there overnight and the next morning the took them to a freeway to get a ride."

It sure was a different time back then. 

On the other hand, if Clive and Mika were passing through Lorain County today, they might be impressed with our roundabouts.

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Thanks to the internet, I did find a photo of Clive Seward from his Dorchester grammar school days in the late 1950s. He's third from the right in the photo below.