Michael Baum Art Contemporary Paintings of the Southwest

Michael Baum
My early life on the road, 1950

My first home was a trailer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Gypsy Rose Lee was a neighbor. I like to think she held me to her breast and cooed sweet nothings in my ear. I was a handsome baby. My mom and dad were in the flush of youth, the war was over and blue sky lay ahead.

We settled in Ohio. For a time, we lived in our little trailer in my grandfather’s back yard. Then came a real house and boyhood in a small town.

The Dixie Highway

Some of the best times of my boyhood were family vacations to Florida. Off we would go, rolling down the Dixie Highway, all the way from Tipp City to the Promised Land of palm trees.

The Dixie Highway was a two-laned, pot-holed ribbon of oil-soaked asphalt that wound through every small burg and big city from Michigan to Florida. Pent up, crawling past the gray factories of Dayton and Cincinnati, the highway broke free into the rolling farms of Kentucky, scaled the heights of the Great Smoky Mountains, Knoxville to Chattanooga, only to plunge into the pine forests and cotton fields of the South. The highway descended into the heat, got lost in the fuming swamps, at last to be reborn in the endless orange groves, sandy beaches, blue seas, and swaying palms of Florida. And all along the way were the countless service stations, diners, motor courts, and souvenir stands calling my name.