Retirement: Life’s Greatest Adventure

Ain’t No Road Just Like It!

By Bill Leavitt, author of Retirement: Life’s Greatest Adventure

One of my favorite songs from my younger days is called “Lake Shore Drive.”  It is a wonderful song about driving up and down the famed Lake Shore Drive along Lake Michigan in Chicago. Lake Shore Drive is one of the most unusual roads in the USA because it is scenic, close to the lake, and had interchangeable lanes in the 1970s. I remember at the time that my teenage daughter thought the song was about drugs, because they sang about “LSD,” (also, “the heavenly blue lights,” and “smell the green”).

I laughingly explained that LSD is the abbreviation for Lake Shore Drive, rather than a name for lysergic acid diethylamide or “acid.”  Blue lights are the lights on top of Chicago police cars, and the green is newly mown grass along the road. The singing group, Aliotta, Haynes, Jeremiah, recorded it in 1971 to be reminiscent of living in Chicago.

The song mentions heading south from Hollywood (the avenue where it starts) pleasure-bound to the Gold Coast (downtown) in the early evening to “start the rounds.” They see “32 [traffic] lights along the way”; the heavy commuter rush-hour traffic “on the water side”; and the shadows of “concrete mountains rearing up” (skyscrapers) on the city side.  The song mentions going home early in the morning, driving from “rats to riches” (downtown versus more well-to-do residential areas on the far north side) and the feeling of “you and your mind and Lake Shore Drive,” referring to breezing along traffic-free when “heading home.”

Anyone who has driven up and down Lake Shore Drive, one of the most iconic roads in the USA, will feel its special qualities, especially when driving on the light traffic side in the early evening or driving up the empty Drive going north late at night.

It is sad to me to see that this wonderful road is losing its name. Now legally called “Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive,” its name will no doubt be shortened to DuSable Drive. 

Still, it provided wonderful memories.

Bill Leavitt is a retired technical writer from Valparaiso and the author of a guide book to successful and active retirement entitled Retirement: Life’s Greatest Adventure.  The book can be purchased for $13.00 (plus Indiana sales tax) at the Visitor’s Center in Hammond (just off the Borman Expressway).  For more information on how to purchase, visit RetirementLifesGreatestAdventure.com.