Author Biography

Richard Ratay was the last of four kids raised by two mostly attentive parents in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in journalism and has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for twenty-five years. Ratay lives in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, with his wife, Terri, their two sons, and two very excitable rescue dogs.

Review

"The season's most playful (and best titled) entry . . . [Ratay] vividly captures that relatively brief – but iconic – time before cheap air travel and Wi-Fi, when 'six people locked up together in a tiny padded room,' hurtling down the highway without seatbelts, was something not simply to be enjoyed but survived. Under Ratay's confident and relaxed spell, anyone of a certain age will be instantly transported back to those more innocent times when Fuzzbusters and eight-track players were the order of the day . . . Deceptively informative, this high-spirited romp down the byways of America is part social history, part memoir, and a loving salute to that brief time when the wood-paneled family station wagon was king of the open road."
—Andrew McCarthy, New York Times Book Review
"Don't Make Me Pull Over! is nostalgia-glazed…charming…[and] poignant."
—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"With smartphones and rear-seat entertainment systems, the family road-trip experience has changed dramatically, writes Ratay in this enjoyable reminiscence on what they used to be . . . [His] informative, often hilarious family narrative perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips."
—Publishers Weekly
"Richard Ratay's long-distance childhood adventures in his family's giant land cruisers are at the center of Don't Make Me Pull Over!, a breezy and warm-hearted 'informal history' of the great American family road trip…It all goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer's day. Mr. Ratay is a charming raconteur who always seems to know just when it's time to get us all back into the car with his big, quintessentially middle-class family."
—Wall Street Journal
"As someone who missed the golden age of the family road trip, I found Don't Make Me Pull Over! a wonderful revelation, filled with unexpected—and frequently amusing—insights into how so much of our culture was built."
—Rob Erwin, author of Lost with Directions: Ambling Around America
"If only this book were available to Clark Griswold, he and his family might well have stayed home.  Don't Make Me Pull Over! is an encyclopedia of road trip adventures."
—Chevy Chase, star of National Lampoon's Vacation and "Saturday Night Live"
"A book with a title as good as Don't Make Me Pull Over! has a lot to live up to, and somehow Richard Ratay manages to deliver. It's a memoir, a work of popular history, and a love letter all in one. Books this wise are seldom so funny; books this funny are rarely so wise."
—Andrew Ferguson, author of Land of Lincoln and Crazy U
"Captures all the adventure, bonding, desperate conflict, and existential self-interrogation that is only made possible by hours (and hours) on the road with your family. Read it, but probably don't read it while also driving your family around."
—John Hodgman, author of More Information than You Require and Vacationland
"Ratay's impressively researched book isn't just a road trip across America—it's a trip back in time. Suddenly I was eight years old again and bouncing around seatbelt-free in the back of a Ford Country Squire station wagon."
—Ken Jennings, record-breaking "Jeopardy!" champion, and author of Maphead
"Ratay has perfectly captured the essence of what it was like to embark on a road trip in the golden days of family vacations. Combining spot-on history and a great sense of humor Don't Make Me Pull Over! feels so authentic I got carsick reading it."
—Jane Stern, co-author of Roadfood
"I was laughing the whole way. As an expert on the 1970's (I was there) I encourage you to climb in, wait for that sweet Toronado engine to purr, and let Rich Ratay take you on his wonderful ride through the great American pastime known as the family road trip."
—Tom Shillue, author of Mean Dads for a Better America
"Entertaining social history spiced with funny family memories. The characters include the first man to drive a car around the world, in 1906 (before fast food!).  And America's first highway czar, who served under seven presidents until Eisenhower fired him. And then there's Ratay himself, as a 10-year-old, on the CB radio: 'Blue Thunder here, gobbling up the zipper dashes like PacMan rollin' for a power pill.' Great stuff."
—Paul Ingrassia, author of Engines of Change   
"Takes us back to the once popular family road trips of vacationing Americans in the 1970's. Stuffed into a station wagon filled with luggage and provisions, backseat-bound Rich typically set off on adventures that possessed all the idiosyncratic melodrama of family life but played out in a confined space."
—Anthony Sammarco, author of Lost Boston and The History of Howard Johnson's
"Smooth prose that entertains and enlightens . . . For anyone who has ever been on a road trip, or is planning to take one, this book is a must read."
—Michael Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road and The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate

Review Quote

"With smartphones and rear-seat entertainment systems, the family road-trip experience has changed dramatically, writes Ratay in this enjoyable reminiscence on what they used to be . . . [His] informative, often hilarious family narrative perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips." --Publishers Weekly

Excerpt from Book

Don''t Make Me Pull Over! CHAPTER 1 Swerving through the Seventies A Family Boldly Leaves Its Driveway One winter evening in 1976, when I was seven years old, I went to sleep in my bed in Wisconsin and woke up in a snowdrift in Indiana. I had little idea how I''d gotten there. I dimly recall my father''s arms cradling me as I looked up through eyelids heavy with sleep. I watched the white ceiling of the hallway turn into the shadowy pine rafters of our garage, then the fuzzy tan fabric of our family car''s interior. I remember being tossed across the laps of my older brothers in the backseat, a pillow pushed under my head, and a blanket thrown over my body. Then I drifted off again into blackness. Next came a startled yelp. I opened my eyes to find myself tumbling in a blur of stuffed animals, eight-track tape cartridges, Styrofoam coffee cups, and issues of Dynamite magazine. I landed on the car''s floor with a thud, the round hump of the transmission housing pressed into my belly, my chin burning from sliding on the shag carpet. I had no idea where we were. But I knew where we weren''t--anywhere near the sunny beach in Florida that I''d been listening to my mom tell us about for weeks. All I could surmise was that I was in our car and it was cold and dark and eerily quiet. Even the engine was still. Finally, my dad''s voice cut the silence. "Jeez, Louise! Everyone okay? Anyone hurt?" my dad asked, his head swiveling around from my mom and sister beside him in the front seat to my brothers and me in the rear. "Wha-what happened?" my mom replied, dazed. Like me, she''d just been roused from a deep sleep to find herself on a whirling carnival ride. "Whoa! We did at least three three-sixties!" gushed my thirteen-year-old brother, Bruce, a little too enthusiastically for the rest of us. "The highway just became a hockey rink!" my dad explained. "Cars spinning everywhere! It''s a wonder we didn''t smack into anyone!" My twelve-year-old sister, Leslie, who got motion sickness from riding escalators at the mall, didn''t say a word. She just stared straight ahead in her usual position between my parents in the front seat, trying not to barf all over the dashboard. After counting heads to make sure none of us had been launched into orbit, my parents quickly assessed our situation. The car was upright, though pitched at an unnerving angle. Good. No one had any obvious fractures or gushing head wounds. Good. Not a single window showed a crack. Also good. The worst that could be said was that all of the loose contents inside our car--maps, Thermoses, shoes, me--were scattered about as though our vehicle had been picked up and shaken like a snow globe. But then that was how the inside of our car generally looked while on a road trip anyway. What was unusual was how dark it was. The only light inside our car streamed in shafts through gaps of thick snow caked on every window. Dad turned the ignition key. To our surprise, the engine roared to life, pressing the windshield wipers suddenly back into action. As they labored to push the clumps of snow aside, we got a better view of our predicament. Our car had come to rest well off the interstate, halfway down a broad slope that served as one side of a wide V-shaped highway median. Since I was only seven years old, I didn''t dwell on the delicate nature of our predicament; instead, I thought about what a great sledding hill this would make--had we been on Dad''s prized wood toboggan and not inside our 1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car. We weren''t alone. As far as we could see, ahead of us and behind, vehicles were scattered about the interstate like toy cars dropped by a cranky toddler. Dad pulled his door handle, allowing a ferocious blast of frigid air to swirl inside. The door barely budged, blocked by a mound of thigh-high snow outside. Dad''s blood pressure instantly redlined. "Cripes Jiminy!" It was one of many colorfully benign phrases he kept ready to avoid blurting out a real ear burner in front of us kids. Others included: "Gee willikers!" "For crying out loud!" and his ever reliable go-to nonexpletive, "Criminently!" That they made no sense wasn''t important. It was enough that they kept him out of the doghouse with my mom and the Catholic Church. Dad slammed the door back and forth against the snowdrift like a battering ram. This took no small effort. The door of a mid-seventies Lincoln was only a slightly smaller version of the one guarding the entrance to a NORAD command bunker. Eventually he cleared enough space to slip outside, and my mom turned off the engine. "There''s no sense wasting gas," she said. "We may be here a while, and we''ll need the heater." My mother was nothing if not practical. "Now did any of you happen to pack candy bars or anything else to eat?" We hadn''t been stuck in the ditch five minutes, and my mom was already formulating a rationing scheme to improve our chances of survival. If raising four kids had taught her anything, it was to always prepare for the worst. Mom and my brothers also began to piece together the morning''s events. As usual, we''d left our home in suburban Milwaukee hours before daybreak. Getting an early start was critical--we had to get through Chicago before rush hour or we''d lose two hours just crawling from one side of the city to the other. Dad''s strategy was to pack the car the day before our departure. Then, promptly at 3:00 a.m. the following morning, he''d storm through the house, flipping on lights and hollering orders like a drill sergeant at reveille. As the baby of the family, and the one most likely to cause a delay, I was simply scooped from my bed, still clutching my beloved blankey, and carried out. Dad would deposit me in the backseat, jump behind the wheel, and we''d be off in a cloud of leaded gas fumes. We''d be a hundred miles from home before any of us were really conscious enough to grasp what had happened. However, that morning my oldest brother, fifteen-year-old Mark, had remained awake. He recounted for the rest of us how the miles had passed uneventfully at first and how we''d even made it through Chicago in record time. But as we crossed Illinois into Indiana, it had begun to snow, and the light flurry quickly whipped into a raging squall. As we reached an exposed stretch of interstate south of Gary, Indiana, whiteout conditions slowed traffic to a crawl--but not slow enough, it turned out. Whipping winds had polished the moist pavement into a sheet of black ice, and without warning, a car ahead of us went into a spin. Trying to avoid a collision, trailing drivers hit their brakes, sending them into swirls of their own. Almost miraculously, Mark continued, no vehicles collided. Instead, each found its way into the snowy sloping median on one side of the interstate or down the steep embankment on the other. Of course, he couldn''t be sure. We''d been busy spiraling into a ditch of our own. The driver''s door popped open, and my dad clamored inside, his face red with cold. "I talked to a trucker with a CB down the road. He said a fleet of wreckers are on the way. With any luck, we''ll be back on the road in a couple hours!" So we waited. Six of us huddled in a jumbo road barge beached on a highway median waist deep with snow. We''d all just been nearly killed in a horrible crash in Nowhere, Indiana. We''d have to endure hours of delay before reaching our hotel (and its pool and game room) that evening. We had no smartphones, no DVD players, no iPods to keep us entertained. Those were all years, even decades, from invention. In our remote location, we couldn''t even find a radio station signal strong enough to get the local news. Really, we had nothing except each other. Years later, we''d all agree it was the best start to a family road trip ever. * * * If there was ever a time Americans needed a vacation, it was the 1970s. Nearly everyone had a good reason to pack up their station wagon or VW minibus and leave it all behind. The gloomy conclusion to the war in Vietnam had sent morale plummeting, while race riots taking place across the country kept tensions high. Unemployment and inflation skyrocketed and remained elevated so long that economists had to coin a whole new term for the phenomenon: stagflation. All the term really meant was that although the seventies also gave us great new things like backyard hot tubs, home VCRs, and countertop microwave ovens, fewer people could afford them. The pressure of making ends meet also helped push the traditional nuclear family into meltdown. The number of divorces filed in 1975 doubled that of a decade earlier. Couples who did stay together had fewer children. The U.S. birthrate plunged to its lowest level since the Great Depression--half that of the baby boom years. Even the government appeared to be falling apart. Just years into the decade, first a vice president and then a president were forced to resign amid allegations of corruption--and hardly anyone placed much faith in the officials who remained. Not even a night at the movies offered much escape. In keeping with the sour mood, many popular movies of the seventies centered on disasters, demons, and dark conspiracies. Audiences were trapped in The Towering Inferno or booked on a doomed flight in any of three Airport movies. If you avoided being swallowed up by the ground in an Earthquake, you might be devoured by the Jaws of a great white shark. The Exorcist offere

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