1930
Imagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and Central America, after only a week’s worth of preparation. This is exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr. did on March 23, 1930. The Lyons acquired some camping gear, studied a few maps, and mounted in the car’s rear seat a fifty-five-gallon oil drum equipped with a gas feed for extra fuel. They divided up the princely sum of $324 in cash to fund their expedition.
The story related here is replete with the brothers’ accounts of the challenges the young men faced on their epic journey, including encounters with a fascinating cast of characters—and unforgettable brushes with fate such as a Mexican freight train that nearly ran them and their car off the rails. The amazing 1930 journey of the young Lyon brothers can be seen as the centerpiece of a larger story, of a pair of lives lived out not just as brothers but as partners in an emerging automobile age.
- Boulder City ReviewPart travelogue, part tale of adventure and part journal. That would describe the account of two brothers’ transnational automobile trip from New York City to Nicaragua.
Accounts of the trip, taken in 1930 by Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr., are told in a new book, 1930: North America’s First Transnational Automobile Trip, which their nephew, Boulder City resident Larry Lyon, recently had published.
Larry Lyon is a psychologist with the Veterans Health Administration in Las Vegas, Nevada. Denis Wood is former Professor of Design and Landscape Architecture at North Carolina State University and the coauthor of Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas. Sally Denton is an award-winning journalist and author, most recently of The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World.
