We seem to have been spending a lot of time lately on the sexual antics and/or misdeeds of our ancestors, and on my way to something else, I began to wonder about the old story of the walk home from the ride in the country. You must know the drill: young man with a car takes his girlfriend out for a ride just to look at the loveliness of the countryside by a setting sun, and when he finds a spot that’s fairly sheltered, either claims he has run out of gas or just pulls over and makes a Certain Proposition. The young lady (assuming she is not as amenable as the one seen here) refuses, the cad tells her she can just walk home from here, and she tearfully vows never to trust a man ever again as she trudges through the darkness toward the city limits.
Maybe the joke has died in a day when a young lady has her phone and the number of Uber or Lyft. OR maybe this is an era when she can just wrestle the keys away from him. In any case, the story is part of American folklore, and continued for many years as a Fine Old Story.
As such, it appears frequently on postcards, especially, for some reason, during the 1920s, when this particular artist showed sympathy with the villain rather than the victim.
The story was already such a popular cliché by this period that it was turned around in the 1925 classic song “If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie”, in which the hero, singing the song, recalls an occasion when he took Susie for a ride and “She didn’t balk; back from Younkers, I’m the one who had to walk.”
The custom might just predate the automobile, though how one ran out of gas with a horse and buggy eludes me at the moment. But there was quite a naughty joke that used the basic scenario oof the girl walking home from a ride in the country and was popular enough to be used as the basis of an adult movie made (perhaps) in 1915, and considered (by some) to be the oldest existing pornographic movie, “A Free Ride”. I am among those who are dubious about these claims, but for OUR purposes, it is based on our essential premise, and may point future researchers to check Classic literature for stories about a man who tells his girlfriend the chariot has a broken wheel. (There IS a reference in the Finnish folk epic The Kalevala to one of the heroes who takes a young lady for a sleigh ride with dishonorable intentions, but he doesn’t even pretend he ran out of snow.)
Moving in the other direction, the joke had a hearty revival after World War II, as more and more Americans found themselves with big cars and cheap gasoline.
And the joke was well enough known that simply referring to a young lady coming home late from a date with very sore feet was understood. But, with the passage of time, do we still tell the story? Some people have suggested this may slip into stories of predatory males, but, after all, as seen at the top of this column, sometimes the young lady was perfectly willing to go along with the gag. (Or came prepared, as in another fine old joke where the man says he’s run out of gas and the young lady produces a hip flask. “Well, that’s the spirit,” the man says, “Is it Scotch? Rye?” “Premium Unleaded,” she says, “Get moving.”)
And, speaking of the passage of time….
Blogsy Babbles 