$39.95 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover/PLC
224 pages with 60 historic and 1 contemporary photographs, 4 historic documents, and 4 maps
8.0″ x 10.0″
ISBN 978–1–938086–67–0
Published in March 2020
Distributed by University of Virginia Press www.upress.virginia.edu
No e-book has been authorized.
Events and Exhibitions
May 11, 2024
Boulder City Library’s Literary Arts Fair
Book presentation
August 15, 2022
Civic Auditorium in The Dalles, Oregon
Book presentation
August 13, 2022
Western Aeronautic and Automobile Museum in Hood River, Oregon
Book presentation
Read a blurb in the Spring 2021 all-digital WSU Magazine under Briefly Noted (pg 52).
Read an interview with Lyon in the Boulder City Review.
by Arthur Lyon
edited and introduced by Larry Lyon, with annotations by Denis Wood and a conclusion by Sally Denton
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 (age 25) and Joe Lyon, Jr. (age 21) did on March 23, 1930. They prepared for the trip by purchasing camping gear, studying maps, gathering information about the areas they planned to traverse, getting their passports and credentials in order, mounted in the car’s rear seat a fifty-five-gallon oil drum equipped with a gas feed for extra fuel, and divided up the princely sum of $324 in cash to fund their sojourn. As for their Spanish? Muy poco (very little).
The story is replete with movie-like accounts of what the young men faced on their epic journey, including encounters with expatriates, government and military officials, and other characters. In Mexico, where they faced nearly impassible roads, they finally had the car fitted with extra railroad wheels so they could literally ride the rails south. The brothers’ 4,562-mile trip ended on May 17, 1930, their fifty-fourth day on the road, after the car suffered mechanical problems and the brothers and car nearly met their fate in the form of an oncoming freight train. Arthur and Joe returned to the U.S. separately, in part by tramp steamer.
The amazing 1930 journey of the young Lyon brothers—the first-ever transnational trip by car in North America—can be seen as the centerpiece of a larger story, of a pair of lives lived out not just as brothers but as partners who sought adventure and careers in the new Automobile Age. To help understand the forces that shaped those lives, the brothers’ nephew, Larry Lyon, provides an introduction that chronicles the family’s rich history, from a family-owned grist mill in southern Missouri to the small mining towns of Pearl, Idaho, and National, Nevada, to their father’s innovative auto-repair business in McDermott, Nevada, the brothers’ founding of Nevada’s first bus company, their investment in oil and gas exploration, and many other business ventures.
Denis Wood, the renowned geographer, provides annotations to the brothers’ journey, highlighting geographic, historical, and current events of the time in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. In the conclusion, Sally Denton, prize-winning investigative journalist and author, reminds us of how truly unique was the brothers’ journey and how it represents Americans’ true longing for exploration and adventure. Readers will no doubt appreciate the story as typifying some of the best of our unique American character.
About
About the Author
Larry Lyon was born in 1947 in Reno, Nevada, and grew up in Reno and Boulder City, Nevada. He completed his B.A. in psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and M.S. in experimental psychology and Ph.D. in clinical psychology, both at Washington State University. Since 1979, he has worked in the mental health field in a variety of settings, including nineteen years in private practice in The Dalles, Oregon. He currently works for the Veterans Health Administration in Las Vegas. He resides in Boulder City, Nevada. His book website is manhattantomanagua.com.
About the Contributors
Denis Wood was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, where he graduated from Western Reserve University with a B.A. in English. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in geography from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he subsequently taught high school. From 1973 until 1996, he taught environmental psychology and design at the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where he was Professor of Design and Landscape Architecture. Author of The Power of Maps (Guilford Press, 1992), he also curated the award-winning Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design exhibition of the same name (subsequently mounted at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.). With Robert J. Beck, he co-authored Home Rules (The Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 1994) about the transmission of culture that occurs in the process of “living a room.” The book was designated one of the top 100 geography books of all time by the Royal Geographical Society. His other book publications include Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas, with Joe Bryan (Guilford Press, 2015), Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (Siglio Press, 2010; Second Edition, 2013), Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guildford Press, 2010), The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, with John Fels (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, with John Krygier (Guilford Press, 2005; Second Edition, 2011; Third Edition, 2016); Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land (Guilford Press, 2004); and Seeing through Maps: The Power of Images to Shape Our World View, with Ward L. Kaiser and Bob Abramms (ODT, 2001; Second Edition, 2005). Wood also exhibits his artwork and lectures widely.
Sally Denton, born in Elko, Nevada, in 1953, is a third-generation Nevadan. She attended the University of Nevada-Reno before completing her B.A. at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1974. Denton received a Nannan Literary Grant in 2000, Western Heritage Awards in 2002 and 2004, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in General Nonfiction in 2006. In 2008, she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her career as an investigative reporter resulted in articles in The Washington Post, Penthouse, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Heritage. Her books include The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs, and Murder, co-authored with Robert Samuel (Doubleday, 1990); The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), which was made into a documentary film broadcast on the History Channel; American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomsbury, 2007); The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (Bloomsbury, 2012); and The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World (Simon & Schuster, 2016). Denton currently resides in Boulder City, Nevada, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her Website is www.sallydenton.com.
Slide Show
Brothers Arthur and Joe Lyon, whose life-long partnership began in their early years in small towns in northern Nevada, were reared in a family with true pioneering spirit, vast ingenuity, and entrepreneurial drive. They were the first to drive, in their 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, all the way from New York City to Managua, Nicaragua, entirely under the Roadster’s power. Just months after the Great Crash of 1929 and with only $324 and sparse traveling gear, the brothers set off on North America’s first transnational automobile trip. It took them 54 days to traverse the 4,562 miles, and their ingenuity and indomitable negotiating ability propelled them to a journey unlike any other. This was before the Pan American Highway was built, so the brothers ultimately had to use their mechanical skills and creativity to fit their Roadster to railroad rails in order to complete their journey. They relied on a Kodak camera to take the photographs that appear in this gallery and the book.
Lyon Super Service Station, the place where the brothers honed their skills. 
Joe (left) in Mexico City. 
South of Saltillo, Mexico. 
The Roadster in the market place at Las Comas, Mexico. 
Camp south of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. 
On the outskirts of Celaya, Mexico. 
On the old Imperial Road between Mexico City and Vera Cruz, Mexico. 
South of Cordoba, Mexico. 
Between Cordoba and Tierra Blanca, Mexico. 
Between Tierra Blanca and SantaLucrecia, Mexico. 
In front of the Ford Agency in Guatemala City, Guatemala. 
Fording the Rio Negro, which forms the boundary between Honduras and Nicaragua. 
At a U.S. Marine camp in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua. 
It took a village to get the Roadster on the flat car in Nicaragua.
Praise
“The result is this wonderful book that is not only a journal and an adventure story but its annotated. It has all kinds of historical notes and sidebar material and some great photos and it’s really wonderful.”
—John L. Smith, State of Nevada contributor, Nevada Public Radio, (read full article and interview here)
“The Lyon brothers’ journey conjures images of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. In Arthur and Joe Jr.’s uniquely American quest, their epic Manhattan to Managua undertaking now takes its place in the panoply of exploration after the close of the frontier.”
—Sally Denton, from her conclusion
“This tale of unmitigated gumption is recounted in the recently published book: 1930: Manhattan to Managua, North America’s First Transnational Automobile Trip. The book is basically the day-to-day dairy of one of the two brothers, Arthur Lyon.”
—Thomas Mitchell, read the full book review on the 4th St8! blog
My Place
During the past few years, I’ve enjoyed the good fortune of seeing the publication of the book that chronicles the amazing journey of my two uncles, Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr, from Manhattan to Managua by automobile in 1930, come to fruition. It was North America’s first transnational automobile trip by anyone. In the process, I gained an appreciation of the important role of the family’s auto-repair and trucking business in making the epic trip possible, along with their subsequent other major professional and business opportunities. I want to share my thoughts about the ways in which the Lyon Super Service Station, based in McDermott, Nevada (see photo), served as a pivotal location in the formation of Arthur and Joe Jr., as individuals and as a team, equipping them for the journey to Central America and for the rest of their fascinating lives.
To set the stage for the eventual founding of the Lyon Super Service Station, I’ll share a bit of family lore. In 1889, my grandfather, Joseph McClurg (“JM”) Lyon, was fourteen years old and the oldest of six children. Toward the end of his life, he dictated to my grandmother the story of the family’s move west in that year. He noted that his maternal grandfather had ” . . . made a business of escorting wagon trains to the Grande Ronde Valley near Salem, Oregon.” At that time, the family was living in southern Missouri, where they ran a grist mill along Spring Branch, which empties into Beaver Creek at a point approximately ten miles southwest of Ava in Douglas County. JM recalled that his father, Irvan, ” . . . traded the mill to Johnnie Cox for two mules, a horse, and some money, and we headed west.” As for many who pulled up stakes and moved west, the trip was filled with adventure, danger, and loss. JM recalled that, at one point in the next few months, he fell ill with typhoid fever, and while he was delirious the baby of the family, Lewis, died of spinal meningitis.
The ensuing several years saw the Irvan Lyon family making frequent moves, mostly involving employment opportunities. The family spent much of the time in northern California, then settled in the small mining town of Pearl, Idaho, where the first three children of JM and Inga (Johnson) Lyon’s children were born. (Arthur, then my father, Kelly, and then Joe Jr. were born in Pearl. The youngest son, Glenn, was born in National, Nevada, and the youngest child, Eloise, was born in Boise.) From what can be gleaned from JM’s account, several of the jobs his father held, often for brief periods of time, had to do with transportation, hauling logs and other freight. Some jobs JM held were involved with mining as well, and, as the years rolled on, the context of the family’s lives revolved mostly around the mining and transportation industries. I believe that, as a result, Arthur and Joe acquired the requisite mechanical skills for a journey such as theirs and that, in addition, the traits of adventure, opportunity, confidence, and mutual support and encouragement were infused into Arthur and Joe Jr.
In 1910, JM and Inga moved the family to the mining town of National, Nevada, which lay against the western slope of a mountain range north of Winnemucca. The gold mine there was considered to be one of the richest in the world. JM worked as a barber and postmaster and dabbled in mining. In 1918, after the National Mine died, the family moved to the town of McDermitt, Nevada, which lies to the north of the former location of National, on the border of Oregon and Nevada. JM purchased the local garage, which he expanded and named Lyon Super Service Station. JM also ran a small truck line out of the garage, affording his sons the opportunity to learn about auto mechanics and driving. The timing was opportune for the business, with increased need for transportation of wool from the Basque country and other products during wartime, and they expanded the auto-repair business in part for bootleggers moving through the area. For a number of years, Lyon Super Service Station formed the center of the family’s business ventures.
Joe Jr., who eventually became an accomplished automotive engineer, took a special interest in the mechanical aspects of the family business. In his later years, he shared with me that, one time when he was about twelve, a rancher’s hired hand came to the station to take JM to the ranch to bring back to life a car that had been sitting on blocks for some time. When JM, over the hired hand’s objections, sent his young son instead, Joe’s success in the endeavor cemented his confidence in his abilities in auto mechanics and his interest in the field. Uncle Joe also shared with me that, after a day of handing tools to his father in the pit under the vehicles they worked on, he would typically lie in bed picturing the wheel assemblies of the vehicles.
While Joe Jr.’s proficiency lay in the mechanical aspects of the business, Arthur honed his financial acumen through the family company. I later learned that Arthur prepared JM’s first-ever income tax statement. He and Joe Jr. were involved in numerous business ventures, some of them involving mineral rights claims. On at least two occasions he spent time in Europe, mostly in Paris. In his later years, he helped a young friend establish a wood-products company in Boise and managed the financial operations of the company.
Though there are many factors involved in the choices we make throughout our lives, it is often easy to see how a set of choices by one generation can prepare future generations for the challenges and opportunities they are to face. JM Lyon’s purchase and development of Lyon Super Service Station and Lyon Truck Line was a choice that certainly had a major impact on the next generation. It is no surprise that, when Joe Jr. arrived on the scene in New York City in 1930, he and Arthur had the adventurous spirit, confidence, and skills, along with the ability to work together on a project despite their obvious differences, to accomplish the feat of driving from Manhattan to Managua. In fact, one can easily surmise that their completion of that journey, in the face of what must have been overwhelming odds, solidified their relationship such that they went on to be partners in numerous other successful ventures throughout their lives, including forming a bus line (the Boise-Winnemucca Stages) they ran for ten years, partnering in oil and gas exploration in the Four Corners area, and many other projects.
I remember my uncles Arthur and Joe as very interesting, intelligent, and generous men from a generation we all admire. I’m thankful for the conversations I had with them in their twilight years. One of my few regrets is that my deep appreciation for the role of Lyon Super Service Station in their formation and the fabric of their fascinating lives developed long after they were gone. If I had had any idea of the central role of their parents’ choice to leave National and take on a new business venture, I’m sure I would have spent more time having them explain it all to me. All of this family history and all the places my family has been—that is my place.
Copyright © 2019 Arthur Lyon. All rights reserved.