Alvin straight daughter rose
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MOWING STRAIGHT ACROSS IOWA
LAURENS, IOWA, JUNE 1994 — When he opened the letter, the news was not good. Alvin Straight’s brother, Henry, had suffered a stroke. The brothers had not spoken for ten years, some falling out over. . . something.
Henry, 80, lived out across the Plains, across the Mississippi, in Wisconsin. Alvin, 73 and legally blind, had no driver’s license. He hated buses, hotels, pretty much anything that infringed on his freedom.
“Ordinary people would just hop on a bus or drive a car,” a local said, “but Alvin was not an ordinary person.”
The day after Independence Day, Alvin Straight set out for Wisconsin, 240 miles away. His mode of transport: a lawnmower.
It’s easy to romanticize Alvin Straight as a hometown hero, salt of the earth, a Prairie vagabond on a heroic odyssey. But the Straight story is anything but straight.
Born in Montana, Alvin Straight had lived and worked odd jobs all over the West and Midwest. Wyoming, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico. . . His first
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That Time a 73-Year-Old World War II Vet Drove 240 Miles on a Riding Mower
When Alvin Straight decided he was going to visit his brother in Wisconsin in the summer of 1994, he wasn’t looking to be famous or get a bunch of money for telling the story. Henry Straight was 80 years old and had just suffered a stroke. The two men hadn’t spoken in years, and younger brother Alvin didn’t know how much time he had to get there.
The problem was, Alvin Straight suffered from diabetes, emphysema and poor eyesight. His vision was so poor, in fact, that he could no longer hold a driver’s license. He didn’t trust anyone he knew to drive him to see his brother, so he took a page from fellow veteran and country singer George Jones’ playbook: He grabbed the keys to his riding lawn mower and headed out.
By the time all was said and done, Straight would make national news, the estranged brothers would be reunited, and his trip would be recreated in a 1999 movie that is still one of the greatest road-trip movies ever made.
Let’s be clear about a few things: Alvin Straight wasn’t crazy or impul
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The Straight Story
1999 film by David Lynch
The Straight Story (stylised as the Straight story) is a 1999 biographicalroaddrama film directed by David Lynch. It was edited and produced by Mary Sweeney, Lynch's longtime partner and collaborator, who also co-wrote the script with John E. Roach. It is based on the true story of Alvin Straight's 1994 journey across Iowa and Wisconsin on a lawn mower. The film is generally regarded as one of Lynch's more accessible and mainstream works, alongside The Elephant Man (1980).
Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) is an elderly World War II veteran who lives with his daughter. When he hears that his estranged brother has suffered a stroke, Alvin makes up his mind to visit him and hopefully make amends before he dies. Because Alvin's legs and eyes are too impaired for him to receive a driver's license, he hitches a trailer to his recently purchased thirty-year-old John Deere 110 Lawn Tractor, which has a maximum speed of about 5 miles per hour (2.2 m/s; 8.0 km/h), and sets off on the 240-mile (390 km) journey from Laurens,
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