My Dad's pictures from a 1948 trip from MD to CO

[greatgrandma]

In 1948, my parents bought a new Ford - a grey two door sedan. We named it Daisy Mae after L'il Abner's girl friend. We were going to drive out to Colorado to see my grandmother - my father's mother, This is the story of that trip written from my memory and from my dad's photos. My dad took 35 mm slides and he had a new Bolex movie camera. I had a little Brownie box camera but I haven't found any of my photos from this trip. Since my dad was as assistant professor, we didn't have a lot of money and we were going to save money by camping. We got camo sleeping bags from army surplus that were rated for Alaska. We didn't have a tent - just a ground cloth to put the sleeping bags on.

Anticipating that it might rain or that there might be a lot of bugs, my mother made screens for the car windows and my dad figured out a way to take the cotter pins out of the front seats and make the area inside the car a level bed. My parents were not tall and I was 10 and my sister was 8. My dad would sleep with his feet under the steering wheel diagonal to the back corner. My mom was on the passengers side beside him with my little sister beside her and I was on the driver's side next to my dad.

During the day my sister and I were in the back seat separated by a pile of sleeping bags. We left Baltimore and drove west. The first photos I have are of a place in Pennsylvania called Eighty-Four. I do not know why we stopped in Eighty-Four

My sister and I were to write our maternal grandmother in Philadelphia about the trip. My mother gave us maps to look at and keep track of our progress. As we were driving through Ohio, I decided to name my sleeping bag and I picked a name of a town on the map - Deerfield. My sister then wanted a name for her sleeping bag, so hers was Ravena (another town in Ohio. We camped the first night in a parking lot in Elyria Ohio. I think we stayed the next night with Ruth Ellen, the daughter of a friend of my parents, but I don't know exactly where she lived.is

It was at this point that some of the flower pictures were taken including the one with my mother and my sister and me sitting in a meadow

I addition to writing to our Philadelphia grandmother and answering questions on the maps (my mother would ask us to find the town we were in and tell her how far it was to the next place which meant we had to add all the little numbers between the intersections, and to estimate how long it would take to get there- math practice plus it avoided the question "Are we there yet"), my dad would sing. He would sing "You are My Sunshine" and then he would do it in various animal voices.

The wall of sleeping bags between us meant that we couldn't reach each other (none of that "She's on MY SIDE") but we could still talk to each other. I would often make up stories to tell my sister. I would ask her to give me three words that I had to use in making up a story. I remember one story about a Magic Hairbrush. I don't remember the plot - I just remember that was one of the stories.

Next we stayed a night with my mother's uncle (my maternal grandmother's younger brother) in Madison Wisconsin.

University of Wisconsin


He was a French professor. My mother's first cousin Ann was only about five years older than I was.

Me, my mother with my sister on her shoulders and her cousin

I don't know what the reason for this bizarre photo is.

Some of the places in the west had minerals in the water (like magnesium salts) which would upset the digestion of people who weren't "from" there. In order to avoid such ailments, we would stop at a local ice house and get ice for our water jug and coolers. Ice freezes faster without salts in it. The ice in the jug would melt and give us cold water to drink

We stopped off at the Mayo Clinic for a photo

Mayo clinic

 

[greatgrandma]

and then stayed with my dad's college friend's family in Minneapolis.

Schiele's family, me, my sister and my mother

Eating ice cream cones at the Schieles

My dad took a photo of the PO of Dawson

Dawson P.O.

because that was my grandfather's first name,

Capital of South Dakota

and we had to have a photo of the South Dakota capitol in Pierre. Pierre (pronounce Peer) was chosen as the capitol of the state of South Dakota because is was approximately in the center of the state. It is the second least populous state capital after Montpelier, Vermont. It is opposite Fort Pierre which was named for Pierre Chouteau, Jr., an American fur trader of French Canadian origin.

Pierre SD capitol (with our car in front)

 

[greatgrandma]

Road in SD

One of our entertainments was reading the Burma Shave signs. We also visited Wall SD - we wanted to see Wall Drug Store. Wall advertised all along the road. They advertised ice water and ice cream. My mother had a thing about milkshakes which were relatively new at that time. She always asked the counter person if they were thick (very embarrassing - what could they say). In those days they made chocolate milkshakes with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. My mother made them make chocolate milkshakes with chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup. So I think I remember having milkshakes at Wall Drugstore.

Needles Eye - Badlands

Vampire Valley- Badlands

From an old postcard: The Bad Lands are the world's greatest example of the production of the weird, fantastic, unexplainable freaks of nature, through early erosion. Great mountains, deep canyons, little hills, castles, palaces, fortresses and figures of every shape stand silently, without a spear of vegetation, while at their feet is that nutritious grass...

Road around the mountain ahead of us

We camped at an overlook in the Badlands National Park. We would find a level spot and first move all the rocks and sticks from the area. Then we put the ground cloth out. We had brown kapok pads (non-waterproof) which went under each sleeping bag, and we put the sleeping bags on top. I thought the sleeping bags smelled sort of like turpentine. We had pillows and we would take off our shoes and put them under the sleeping bag (to keep them from getting wet with dew) and then get into the sleeping bag fully dressed. There was a flap on the bags to pull over our heads. A toad hopped across our sleeping bags during the night.

This particular morning, some other tourists came to the overlook very early while we were still sleeping. They didn't see us at first - our sleeping bags were camouflaged. When they did see us, they shushed themselves and started to whisper and left quietly.

In the morning, mother would make breakfast on the camp stove (she would rub brown soap over the bottom of the pan so that the pans wouldn't get sooty and hard to clean) and she would boil water for Daddy's coffee and so he could shave. He would hang a mirror on a tree so he could see to shave. My sister and I would sit on the front fenders of the car and eat our cereal out of little boxes.

Driving through the Badlands

 

[greatgrandma]

Bluffs in SD

South Dakota


From the Badlands we visited

The Shrine of Democracy


Mt Rushmore

Rushmore Memorial, Black Hills, S. Dak.

and we saw (although we did not visit) Devil's Tower

Devil's Tower

Devil's Tower Closer

 

[greatgrandma]

Road near Yellowstone

Driving through the west in the summer it was hot. We did not have A/C in the car of course. Not many people had A/C in those days. So we would have the windows open and we would stick our feet out of the windows. Daddy would also give us a piece of ice and tell us to put it behind our knees, or on our neck to cool the blood that was close to the surface there.

Hills and prairie - WY

After we crossed the South Dakota border, we were in Wyoming.

Buffalo Bill statue in Cody WY

"Buffalo Bill -- the Scout," a bronze sculpture of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody as a western scout at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. The statue was created in 1924 to commemorate the town's most famous resident and de facto founder, Buffalo Bill Cody

We got to Yellowstone NP on the 4th of July. In Yellowstone, because of the bears they would not let us camp without a tent, so we stayed in a cabin.

A bear

Bear holding up traffic - Yellowstone

Back then the bears still came to the dump by the Old Faithful Inn (people staying there would go out on the veranda at night to watch-it was a central part of the Yellowstone experience (both advertised and felt) for decades.) and they came right up to the cars begging for food. It was not until 1970, when Yellowstone banned visitors from feeding bears and set up bear-proof garbage containers around the Park, that bear feeding came to a full stop.

Mostly the animals that we saw were bears, but we did see a moose. I took a photo of it with my little Brownie camera - when the film was developed and the print came back, disappointingly, the moose was only the size of my little fingernail.

 

[greatgrandma]

Old Faithful

Old Faithful

My sister, my mother and me at Biscuit Basin

Boardwalk around thermal pools

Biscuit Basin

 

[greatgrandma]

Morning Glory Pool

Morning Glory pool was a beautiful blue. The vents hadn't yet been clogged by people throwing things in it. (It was said that if you threw in a linen handkerchief, it would come back laundered)

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone


There are two falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone but because the river bends between them, you can't see both of the falls from the same point.

Lower Falls Grand Canyon of Yellowstone


When we went to the park in 1948, we were given some kind of schedule with the locations of the geysers and their normal schedule. We tracked some of them down and then waited for them to erupt. My sister remembers the smell of sulpher.

Steam

 

[greatgrandma]

Geyser

Waiting for an eruption

Grotto Geyser

When we left Yellowstone we went by the Grand Tetons and we camped in the car late one evening - it was dark so we couldn't see our surroundings. We woke up next to a snowbank.

My first visit to Wyoming (that I remember) was back about 1943 to visit my Great Uncle Leonard and Great Aunt Bertha That's where we went next. Uncle Leonard was the brother of my grandmother (my father's mother). He was born in Germany and came to the US in 1893 with his family when he was 11. He worked at various jobs including as a cowboy, but he met his wife Bertha Meyers when he was in engine service with the Union Pacific Railroad. They married in 1914, and in 1917 they built their home at 1310 Garfield in Laramie Wyoming

They lived there until he died in 1965. She outlived him by 20 years.

Great Uncle Leonard and Great Aunt Bertha in front of their house

 

[greatgrandma]

Great Uncle Leonard - a fault in the film makes it look like his gun has fired from the holster

Uncle Leonard brought out his cowboy gear for us to try - hats and chaps.

Me dressed in chaps

Then he took us to the Union Pacific rail-yards.

Union Pacific railyard

Uncle Leonard with us

My sister and me - railroad engineers

My sister and me

 

[greatgrandma]

Next he took us to Cheyenne. Daddy could take a photo of the capital,

Capital of Wyoming

and we visited Baker Cabin in Frontier Park. The Jim Baker Cabin was built in 1873 by frontiersman Jim Baker as a fortified house on the Little Snake River at Savery Creek near present-day Savery, Wyoming.

Baker Cabin, Frontier Park, Cheyenne, WY

The two-story log building measures 31 feet by 16 feet with two rooms on the lower level and a single smaller room on the upper level. The outer walls are made of logs 12 inches to 15 inches thick. Jim Baker was a trapper with Jim Bridger and served as an interpreter and scout with Kit Carson. In 1917 interest in preserving the cabin resulted in its purchase by the state of Wyoming, in part to prevent its removal to Denver for display. It was dismantled and moved to Frontier Park in Cheyenne. (In 1973 it was moved back to Savery).

Baker Cabin, Frontier Park, Cheyenne, WY

And most exciting of all - we went to the Cheyenne Frontier Days.

Cheyenne Frontier Days July 27-31 - sign on top of a hotel