How Kelly McEvers Visited All 50 States
6/23/202613 min
Kelly McEvers has visited all 50 states. But not on purpose.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsKelly McEvers· Host0:01
[gentle music] My man has this tiny little notebook we call the cement book. It's maroon, has a hard cover.
Speaker 20:13
Mm.
Kelly McEvers· Host0:13
Can fit in your hand. On the front, it says, "Use Alpha Cement." Inside the cover is a calendar from 1927. I bought it for him at a thrift store. And on the next page, there are these hand-drawn pictures of bags of cement. There's a little coupon in the back where you could fill out your name and the thing you're building and mail it to Alpha, and they would mail you back a 112-page handbook on cement construction. That was back then, of course. The company went out of business in the early '80s. Anyway, inside the book, there are also a bunch of blank pages, and every time my man would sleep somewhere new, he would write down the name of that place. And a lot of the time, I was sleeping in those places, too. So this cement book is a time machine, a picture of the years when we were running around a lot, driving across country in our friends' cars, our family's cars, driveway cars. And it's a record of how we each eventually, and kind of without meaning to, made it to every state in the US. What I'm saying is going to all 50 states wasn't the goal.