July 18, 2001
Durham, North Carolina — Glenside, Pennsylvania
The big surprise now behind us, our next stage was driving explicitly north again for the first time since we left Utah and drove to Colorado. Day 31, the penultimate day of our trip, meant we were going to Philadelphia to visit my paternal grandparents at their home in suburban Glenside. I’d been up there plenty of times as a kid, especially when we’d lived in Northern Virginia. The drive from Durham wasn’t nothing, with more than four hundred miles to cover, plus the first real prospect of traffic since we’d been in California more than ten days prior.
We’d be taking I-85 to Petersburg, Virginia where we’d hop on I-95 to take us into the most highly populated area of country. To say this was a different experience from the overwhelming majority of our trip to date would be grand understatement. Leaving early would give a chance to do something in Philly before dinner, and hopefully beat some of the worst of the traffic.
Once we hit 95, we passed through Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore, then nicking the twenty-six miles of Delaware before reaching the outskirts of Philadelphia. I-476 took us wide to the west, and we finally nestled into Glenside about ten miles north of Center City. That’s right, it’s not downtown in Philly, it’s Center City. My grandparents had lived there for a number of years, having previously moved all over the country. I’d visited them as a baby in Denver, and they’d been in Virginia and Ohio for long stints before that. My grandfather, Stan, mentioned earlier thanks to his use of the SS Badger in the early 1950s, was in the hospitality business. He’d been the club manager at the Firestone Club in Akron, Ohio in the 70s, and by now was the club manager at the Union League, *the* club for Republican Philadelphians. My grandmother, Carol, had retired by then, after a long career as a teacher, and then most recently at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, America’s oldest country club, open since 1854. Clearly, we were in for a very different experience in a major city, especially compared to say, our time in Los Angeles.
Like our stop in Durham, I am limited in specific information about what we did on what day, but I think I’ve got this order right. And if not, who really cares twenty years later?
After visiting at the house with my grandparents, who had met Win before on a visit to Durham, but obviously not Wes, my grandfather took us into town for a special surprise. Our destination: the aforementioned Union League. Something you need to understand, one does not saunter into the Union League off the street. No matter who you are or what you’re wearing. But you are really really not coming in if you’re not wearing a collared shirt and long pants. As I recall, my grandad let us off the hook on the shorts front, as it was summer and we were kids, but did require us to put on polos at the very least.
As exquisite as the Second Empire style building is on Broad Street, two blocks from City Hall, the interior is simply breathtaking. The walls are pristine wood, surely mahogany, with inset bookcases and small statues, marking the giants of Philadelphia’s past and the tomes marking intellectual as well as political giants. There are sitting rooms, smoking rooms (it was still 2001), dining rooms, exercise rooms with attendant, luxurious locker rooms and saunas. And the ceilings! The ceilings, wow. Each room with a different look, handcrafted designs were evident as our necks strained as we looked upward without slouching too much backward. This was the Union League, you stand up straight. Chandeliers hung from the center of nearly every room, stained glass filled the windows, and portraits adorned the other walls, featuring men in every style of dress dating back to the era of Abraham Lincoln.
I will never forget being in utter awe of this place, after hearing my grandfather talk it up for probably ten years. It never occurred to me it would far surpass his superlatives. Something I’ve learned as an adult is that my grandpa has the best things to say about everywhere he lives. Which is a quality I really love. Nothing worse than someone who shits on a place, wishing to be somewhere else. But it’s also understood that there are limits to this style of homerism. Well, he was not wrong about the Union League.
Adding to the feeling of wonder in this place normal people never see outside of a movie was how he knew every single person in the place! “Hi, Mr. Orr!” “Hello, Mr. Orr.” “Ah, Mr. Orr, good afternoon.” They were all different, but they were all the same: reverential to the boss, the man in charge. And I’m not talking about the staff here. That was a different level to me, and something I observed even more strongly at a future job he held in North Virginia when I was just out of college. In this case, every one of these distinguished gentlemen had a good word to say to my grandfather, but not in the totally superficial way one might expect. No, my grandfather was known, really known by those frequenting this insane, delightful, and, well, exclusive-beyond-words place.
I want to make clear that I am not a Republican and clearly have some philosophical and ideological differences with probably almost every member of this club. But when I was 18, I didn’t really know anything about that stuff. It was shoved in my face a few months later, and as previously mentioned in this space, it’s impossible to remember how it was to not know the hyper nationalism and hyper partisanship that’s dominated the two decades since. At the time, though, I was blind to those differences, partly by age, and partly by the fact that I could see my reflection in the *wood* in this place!
Having blown our minds at the Union League, my grandfather brought us back to their lovely house for family dinner. I cannot recall what we ate, without the aid of my trusty journal, but I’m 38 years old and I’ve never once had a bad or unsatisfying meal with my grandparents, so I’m certain we were well fed. And it was a real treat to be with my grandparents as something approaching an adult. I hadn’t spent as much time with them as my maternal grandparents growing up, so I was very proud to bring my good friends to them and share our experiences. My grandmother had done something similar a few years into college, taking the train all across Europe at an age just a few years older than we were. I didn’t know much about that back then, but I recall her sharing some of those memories and feeling a different, closer connection than I had as a younger child.
This is also when we learned that my grandfather had taken the Badger! We brought it up like it was some novelty, something they’d never heard of and would be impressed by. And they were. But then we learned we were forty-eight years late on being the first in the family to execute such a crossing! We had a good laugh and I think had a fun moment where we all respected each other in the wanderings and the in-the-moment nature of various forms of travel in one’s youth. The fact that we were still in it didn’t matter, we had something in common with my family, and that was such a cool feeling.
We stood on the back porch with my grandfather after dinner, as he smoked his customary cigar, and we looked out over their backyard, with paths winding back to an ancient fireplace of a house no longer extant, predating our time by more than a century. The deep, luscious greens of the trees and the ivy in their backyard at dusk was the perfect way to end the day. We’d gotten the dark wood version of this in the Union League, and now we got the slightly wilder, shirt untucked version.
This was such a different day from all the rest. Waking up at my own house. Going to sleep at my grandparents’ house. In between driving up the familiar freeway of my youth. And yet, we got to experience things we’d never imagined we’d have access to, but in a low-key manner suiting our life experience and stature in the world. With only one more night left, this was a great way to bounce back into driving mode but also wrap things up with family like the way we started. We had one more day on the road, so we went to bed feeling accomplished, proud, and honestly, ready to be done.
