In February 1947 an American businessman in Mexico City hopped aboard a bus with his wife and started out for Maine, reportedly to check out a farm that the woman had inherited in the town of Readfield. Traveling north, they crossed the border from Mexico into Texas, passing through cities like Dallas, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Although Eugene Le Bar had started to feel sick on the bus, aspirin and headache medicine bucked him up enough during a stop in New York City for shopping and sightseeing, according to a 1947 account in the American Journal of Public Health by Israel Weinstein, then-New York commissioner of health. Le Bar and his wife checked into a Manhattan hotel on March 1.
