My personal involvement with hitchhiking started while I was a high school student. This form of free transportation continued on during my first period of service as a member of the U.S. Army and for most of my years as a college student.

This interesting phase of my life ended when I finally purchased a car.

Going to a place to swim was the start of my involvement with hitchhiking. However, my original hometown of Baker, Ore. (still about the size of Waseca) then didn’t have an indoor or outdoor swimming pool. The river which ran through the city was badly polluted with cyanide tailings from a gold dredge about 30 miles upstream. The only lake or pond we had was a place for dumping logs off railroad flatcars and floating them up into a sawmill. Thus, the only nearby place we had for swimming was a hot spring with a &uot;cement pond&uot; located about a dozen miles north of Baker. We had a choice of riding our bikes to this place, going in a car with someone else, or hitchhiking.

My U.S. Army basic training in 1945 was taken at Camp Roberts, Calif., This post was located about midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. On weekends I used hitchhiking (in uniform) to travel to San Luis Obispo to visit folks who had previously lived in Baker, plus an aunt and cousin who lived in Glendale (a part of the Los Angeles area). Incidentally, in that era, once a person got into Santa Monica, the streetcar or metro bus systems could be used to travel anywhere in Los Angeles.

My overseas duty was in Korea during 1946. And here the only way to travel from place to place was by hitchhiking. However, our only rides came with military vehicles. Sometimes this included riding in the back of a truck with other hitchhikers or whatever supplies were being hauled to another destination.

I used a combination of hitchhiking and bus riding to move from Oregon to the Midwest and finally Minnesota in

1947, The bus rides were used to travel through states known to have laws against hitchhiking, or to get out of big cities and to smaller towns where prospects were better for getting rides.

During this particular trip, which took a month that included a week in Flagstaff, Ariz., I experienced just one unusual incident. In Kingman, Ariz., a car with the windows rolled down and occupied by what appeared to be high school boys swerved off

the roadway in my direction. I quickly stepped back. There was some wild laughing and evidently someone in the front seat looked like he was throwing something in my direction. That something was a firecracker.

However, the firecracker had a short fuse or blew back into the back seat. Anyway, I heard an explosion and this car nearly swerved off the road. Could we call this backfire?

To answer a logical question, during those hitchhiking trips I spent the nights in cheap hotels or motels or YMCA facilities in larger cities.

The best and longest ride I had came late one early summer evening in Dickinson, N.D. Just why I went this far north on a trip back to Oregon between college quarters may have come about with a desire to see another part of

the nation.

Anyway, I was about to quit when a car stopped. The driver saw my suitcase with the Mankato State pennant on the side and said he once knew someone who lived in that city, then asked where I was going. I replied with Portland, Ore., where two aunts and an uncle then lived.

This driver happened to be a Lutheran pastor from a small North Dakota town who was also going to Portland to visit relatives. I kept him company, paid for the gas every other time, and really enjoyed riding with a very nice man on the hitchhike across Montana, Idaho and Washington into Oregon.

My days of traveling by thumb ended during my senior year in college when I obtained a driver’s license and a well used and abused car.

(Feature writer Ed Shannon’s column appears each Friday.)