#1673 In the Belly of the Beast

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Clay and his friend Russ Eagle discuss John Steinbeck’s 1960 Travels with Charley tour of America from within Steinbeck’s truck camper Rocinante. Thanks to the great generosity of the folks at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Clay and his Steinbeckian friend Russ were permitted to do the podcast at the dinette table of the pickup camper. They told the story of how Steinbeck purchased the camper—then a novelty—, how he used it as a metaphor for his travels in search of America, what happened to it after his transcontinental journey, and how it eventually found its way to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, where John Steinbeck grew up. Clay and Russ were able to report their discovery in the Center’s archives of a document that shows just when Steinbeck returned home after his three month trek—thus solving one of the questions historians have had about the whimsical journey with his French poodle Charley. This episode was recorded live on September 27, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast.
0:04.5	Amazing, fabulous. Oh, my. Unbelievable.
0:09.0	Thrilling.
0:10.6	My friend Russ Eagle and I were able to do a podcast for listening to America from within the belly of the beast,
0:18.2	from within John Steinbeck's truck camper at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.
0:25.2	This came at the end of a long and great week of our fourth Steinbeck cultural tour.
0:31.9	Normally we have headquartered in Monterey.
0:33.9	This time we headquartered in Salinas because we had access to all of our meetings
0:39.6	in the Steinbeck Center. And it was amazing. So our people had the chance to go through the exhibits
0:45.2	there. When we began negotiating with the Steinbeck Center about the event that we would hold there
0:52.8	for a week, I wrote them a letter saying, I know this is a terrible long shot. I know you can't do this. I know you're going to rebuke us. I know you'll probably cancel our even coming, blah, blah, blah, and so on. But is there any chance whatsoever that we could do a podcast from within the rig? And to our utter astonishment, they said, no, no, we'll make this one-time offer. We'll let
1:12.6	you do it from within the rig. So we brought up our friend Brian Hall, a professional
1:16.3	videographer, and Russ and I spent about an hour and 40 minutes inside, in the museum itself,
1:25.5	before they opened on a Saturday morning.
1:28.3	And we had two excellent microphones and we did the podcast.
1:32.3	And we began by describing what we saw, which is sort of a typical truck camper of the sort
1:38.3	that you would buy today, only it was done in dark woods.
1:43.3	And I think we were both so giddy that we hardly paid attention to what passed through our mouths.
1:48.6	But I know it was an interesting conversation about Steinbeck, about his travels, about how he
1:53.5	obtained the rig and how the rig wound up there.
1:56.2	Because when he got back in December of 1960, the unceremoniously got rid of it. It had served its purpose.
2:06.5	He sold it to a farmer in Maryland. That farmer took the camper unit off and used the pickup for
	...

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