Episode 205: Alice Ramsay

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This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate Tamao.

The call to adventure came in the form of a rumbling engine.

Alice Ramsey was riding a horse along a country road.

It was a new hobby for a new life.

Just a few short years before, she was a 16-year-old girl living in her parents' modest home when a man took interest in her.

He was a prominent one there in Hackensack, New Jersey.

A well-to-do banker and owner of a brick factory, a future congressman.

which her parents couldn't know at the time, but surely seemed like the kind of thing that was ahead for a man like him.

He was the perfect suitor, except that he was in his mid-forties, too old for their teenage daughter.

And so Alice went off to Vassar College and threw herself into her studies and loved them.

And then her parents pulled her out of college when she was old enough to marry the middle-aged banker guy.

So at 21 years old, married to a man more than twice her age and now the mother of a young son, The newly minted Mrs.

Ramsey began taking long horseback rides in the countryside.

She would be away from her husband and child for hours at a time.

She seemed to like it that way.

One day she and her horse were trotting along some dappled country road when, to her surprise, because it was 1908, a car drove by, tearing down the dirt road at the unimaginable speed of 30 miles an hour.

Whether this startled Alice, we do not know, but we do know about the horse, who reared up in fear and had Alice clinging for dear life and then bolted, tearing off in a wild ride through the woods.

And when Alice Ramsey returned home, winded and disheveled, maybe a little muddy, maybe sporting a scratch in her brow where a branch had lashed her in the dash through the trees, and she told her husband about the car and the frenzied gallop and how she'd managed to hold on and finally managed to get control of the terrified horse, it was all rather exhilarating, truth be told.

mister Ramsey did not find it exhilarating.

His wife could have been killed.

This couldn't stand.

And he was a man of the world.

He knew the winds of change were blowing.

He knew that cars were the future.

He couldn't risk having Alice being thrown during another ride on some increasingly crowded road.

And so he bought her a car.

He figured it would be safer.

Lower to the ground, a metal box that could protect her from the dangers of the road.

If she wanted to explore the confines of her new life, she could do it in an automobile.

But she would not be confined.

While John Ramsey was off managing his banks in his brick factory, fantasizing about his future congressional run, Alice Ramsey was off driving.

Pretty much all the time.

Over the course of the next year, her 22nd, she logged 6,000 miles behind the wheel, which was so many.

There were no highways, very few paved roads, and speeds that rarely hit that ferocious 30-mile-per-hour mark, like the car that startled her horse and changed her life.

This meant thousands and thousands of hours in her car, and she loved it there.

You can see her, dark curls piled up under a riding cap, a dress with puffy sleeves and a puffier skirt that provided a built-in cushion for those unpaved roads.

In photographs, she is usually smiling.

Her top teeth protrude a bit in a way that would never go uncorrected these days for a young woman of means.

It is a great smile.

She poses by her car, one of those first ones, the spoke tires, the exposed engine, the floodlight headlights, the big steering wheel fit for a ship at sea.

Alice's son is not in these pictures.

Alice was, by all accounts, content to leave the boy at home with a governess.

And I too am content to leave him out of the rest of the story.

Whether you want to bring him along with you in the back of your mind as you listen is your choice.

But he wasn't in the back of the car.

Neither was her husband, who found cars scary.

Though he admired his wife's expertise behind the wheel.

And he too, for whatever reason, seemed perfectly content to have her out of the house, driving around with friends and family, whomever would brave the ride.

The next year, she entered a contest and took a hundred-mile journey out to Montauk, the sandy tip of Long Island.

A decade and a half later, Gatsby and Nick Carraway would be zipping back and forth out that way under the watchful eyes of T.J.

Eccleberg in no time, but in 1909, it took her two days, driving around the clock.

It was a remarkable achievement.

Among those remarking was the sales director of an automotive startup called the Maxwell Briscoe Company, who drove a company car out to Hackensack to talk to Alice Ramsey, or to talk to John Ramsey about his wife.

Alice's drive to Montauk had set the sales director's wheels turning.

What if she drove farther?

What if he gave her a brand new, top-of-the-line 1909 Maxwell Model DA?

Four cylinders, 30 horsepower, three gears, top speed, a mind-blowing 45 miles an hour.

And what if she,

a lady,

drove that car all the way across the country.

This proposal was audacious, bordering on the preposterous.

Five years earlier, a dentist with the adventurer's name of Horatio Nelson Jackson drove from San Francisco to New York in 69 days, accompanied by a mechanic and a bulldog named Bud.

His journey made headlines around the world.

But despite those headlines and the pomp and accolades they engendered, only one other team, all-male, managed to make it from coast to coast in the whole half decade that followed.

It It would be quite a thing to be able to say that the first woman to drive across America did it in a Maxwell Briscoe.

Alice Ramsey kissed her husband goodbye, climbed into the car, waved to the press, and the crowd that had lined the Manhattan sidewalk despite a downpour to see her off.

She wore a poncho over her dress.

as did the three women who would accompany her on her journey.

Her husband's two sisters, Nettie and Margaret, both married women in their early 40s, and a friend of Alice's named Hermine Johns, who was nearly 20, though the newspapers said she was 16.

The three women were along for the ride, for company and assistance as necessary, and to cheer Alice on as she drove them up rain-blackened Broadway, off to see the country in a way that no women had before.

They would arrive in San Francisco 59 days later to great fanfare.

And Alice, who was behind the wheel the whole time, her companions never drove, became the first woman to drive across the continental United States in an automobile.

And that is important.

Sure, for sure.

It had never been done before, and this was a time when there were very few women driving, or honestly pursuing, or being allowed to pursue, like,

most things.

And I don't doubt that this meant a lot to many women who followed her journey in the papers.

We have no way of knowing how many girls and women heard about Alice Ramsey and decided they too would learn how to drive.

Or how many were inspired to do something else, anything else, whatever was their own version of driving across the country.

Maybe they said, Alice did that, I can do this.

Maybe they didn't even know, couldn't have told you that reading about Alice's journey nudged them in some small way, maybe even years later, to take one of their own.

Maybe they learned to fly.

or to type or work at cash register to take some step toward a different life that they wouldn't have taken if she hadn't taken that drive.

This was important,

but it was also marketing.

The Maxwell Briscoe Company wanted to sell more cars to more people, and there was a whole type of person, slightly more than half the population of persons, who weren't buying cars yet.

They sent a reporter ahead by train to greet Alice's car at each stop so he could write about her pushing the remarkable roadster to a thrilling 42 miles per hour on their way out of Cleveland and about the plucky young driver and her companions marveling at the majesty of the American West from the comfort of their diamond pleated leather seats of their Maxwell model DA.

An ad would later boast that the historic journey was made without a particle of car trouble.

Years later, Alice Ramsey would write a book about her drive to San Francisco that would put the lie to that line.

The book is called Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron and it is delightful.

And in it is incident after incident of blown tires and broken axles and defective spark coils, of losing whole days waiting for special mechanics to come down from Syracuse to fix something that neither Alice nor the local guy at the Maxwell Briscoe dealership could.

In fact, the whole of the company and its affiliated network of service stations were at the Ramsey Party's disposal.

This was the deal, as presented to Alice's husband.

Whatever went wrong out there on the roadless road, the Maxwell Briscoe Company would be there to make sure they made it to San Francisco, whatever the cost.

It was marketing, but it was also Alice's life.

And Nettie's and Margaret's and Hermione's.

And the people reading the Maxwell Briscoe Company's official version of their smooth trip were missing out.

There was this one time that they were stuck in the mud in the Midwest.

It had been raining off and on for a few days and As they were trying to get their wheels unstuck, their radiator overheated, and they didn't have any extra water to cool it down.

So the women went into their toiletries kits and got out compacts and toothbrush holders, Sterling silver and crystal.

These were fancy Eastern ladies in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the country, and they scooped up rainwater from irrigation ditches by the side of the road, compact lid by compact lid, until they got the maximum running again.

They all learned how to change tires, place spark plugs, all manner of engine repair.

Alice learned that her prissy, patrician-seeming sisters-in-law came alive in the car, ate it all up.

The scenery, the dust, getting lost, seeing a field of tall grass they had to cross and having no idea whether the car could make it, but just plunging on anyway.

They all learned so much.

They navigated roads that weren't roads with maps that were often no use at all.

There was a guidebook for motorists, a brand new thing at the time, and Some nights it would be a godsend, pointing them to a campground or gas station just when they needed one most, but then then it could also just fail them.

They went desperately searching for a yellow barn at which the book told them they had to turn left or they'd go entirely off track.

They drove around for hours and hours before they figured out that the yellow barn had been painted green by the guy who owned it, who raised horses and didn't like cars, and didn't want to help people driving them if he could help it.

And the guidebook just stopped the Mississippi.

And then they were off into the unknown.

Cornfields and wheat fields and winding rivers rivers and cicada sounds and headlights on flickering leaves and the Rockies, snow-capped, just ahead.

Just look at them.

There was another component to the marketing too, beyond the Maxwell's flawless performance, not a particle of trouble, we read.

Alice was chosen because Alice was the right gal for the gig.

She was married to an upstanding member of the community who approved wholeheartedly of her adventures.

Her companions were two married women in their 40s, good God-fearing ladies who could be understood as responsible chaperones to Alice and her young companion, a mere girl of 16.

A wholesome crew to hang a brand on.

Nothing untoward happening out there in the road in close quarters and shared beds.

When they arrived back in New York after a luxury return trip by train, the papers noted the apparent joy of Alice's reunion with her husband.

In articles announcing the birth of her second child the next year, take a goofy pleasure in suggesting that the baby girl was the product of that joy.

I read a journal article by a historian named Catherine Parkin about Alice Ramsey's life behind the wheel, and Alice was always driving.

She drove until she was 90.

She died at 97.

And in that long life, she took dozens of road trips.

Europe, Australia, North, and South America.

I would say that famous New York to San Francisco trip was her first adventure, but it wasn't.

There was Montauk.

There was the horse that bolted and started this whole thing.

Her whole life was adventures.

Anyway, Dr.

Parkin lays out a very convincing case that Alice was gay, that the paper said that Hermione Johns was 16 instead of 20, so that no one would suspect there was anything happening between the two of them when there probably was.

And then she spent most of the rest of her life on long drives with female companions.

And after her husband's death, when Alice was 47,

it seemed to be be an open secret that her best friend and road trip partner was her partner.

But we can't know for sure.

She never said it directly.

She generally seemed to be really good at controlling the narrative of her life.

Maybe she learned it from the sales manager of the Maxwell Briscoe Company.

For decades, she spoke all the time at auto clubs and women's groups and rotaries and moose lodges, whatever.

And she'd tell stories about her life in the road, about that famous first trip and her most recent adventure.

She'd get an award, crack some jokes, regale audiences in banquet halls while they ate the fish or the chicken.

And in all those stories, and in her memoir, and in the many interviews she did in her 97 years,

she leaves out a lot.

She never really talks about her family life before or after her husband died.

Or even why all those years before her husband let her, and it was 1908, so let her is the only way to put it,

Drive that first 6,000 miles around Hackensack.

Never mind drive the 3,800 across the country.

When no woman had done that before.

In a time before highways and travel guides, street signs and exit numbers, GPS.

There is so much you can find without a map.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in May of 2023.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

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