A cross-country trip that will remain in my memory forever. The picture above is of my handsome brother, 21 years my senior, who made the Navy a career.
California or Bust
by Mendy
10/25/2003
It was the summer of 1965. My brother, Ralph was in the military and had been since he was 18 years old and before I was ever born. He was now stationed in California and Mom and Dad had saved all the extra money they could for a year or more so that we could make the trip out to visit Ralph and his family. Dad had recently bought a 1964 Chevy Malibu and we were packing it up to make the trip. It was July and it was very hot. I was nine years old and ready for an exciting adventure.
My sister Nancy had just graduated high school and she had a job at the City Loan in Jackson and Pat was 15 years old and she had decided she did not want to go on such a long trip, so Mom decided to let her stay at home with Nancy. Pat had just fallen for a cute boy named Jeff Dalton and I think she didn’t want to leave him for two weeks! And even if Nancy didn’t have a new job, she wouldn’t have left Greg for that long either. So it was just Mom and Dad and me.
We left home very early in the morning, like 3:30 or 4:00 and I was still in my pajamas and asleep. When it came daylight, Mom woke me up and I dressed in the back seat of the car. Our vacations had always consisted of visits to Bonnie’s or Ralph’s because they were the ones that lived far away from home. We had visited Bonnie in Florida at Christmas time when I was 4 years old and now this was the biggest trip we would ever go on…. California! It sounded like a foreign land to me.
Dad had been there when he was about 20 years old. He had hitchhiked and jumped freight trains to go there to look for work. California was known to be the land of opportunity back in the depression, I guess. So Dad had stories of his adventures and he always told us how pretty it was and that the sunsets were beyond belief…all colors of golds and purples and oranges. He said it was a beautiful sight to see.
One of the stories Dad told was of when he was at a Chinese Restaurant (I think he may have worked there for a short while) and when he went to the alley behind the restaurant, he had seen cat bones all over the place. So from then on, he told us that Chinese food was cat meat! That never mattered to me because I thought I would never have the chance to eat Chinese food in my lifetime. But when I was 12, Bonnie took us to our first Chinese restaurant in Columbus (and Dad ate it, too). Every time I would start to take a bite, Dad would do a high pitched “meow” out of the side of his mouth. He had a warped sense of humor! But now Chinese is one of my favorite cuisines.
So, here we were, driving along as the sun was coming up and we were going to California. We had packed some food for the first day and we stopped on the roadside to fix it. We had a little grill and Mom fixed bacon and eggs. At this point in my life I had never eaten in a sit-down restaurant with my family, if you can believe that.
Now if you have never traveled with my Mom, you are in for a treat. She is the ultimate Girl Scout when it comes to traveling…she is always prepared! There was always a damp washcloth wrapped in foil so that we would be able to wash our hands before we ate. She always froze clean milk jugs full of water and that is what you would drink along the way as it melted. There was no stopping for Cokes; that was a waste of money. There was always a plastic little trash bag that was made to hang on the crank-down handle of the window. It was unthinkable for my mom and dad to throw anything out the window, and back then we weren’t told not to litter. That phrase had not come into play yet. It was just something we knew not to do. Now that I think about it, my mother was the original inventor of bottled water, she was the original recycler, and she was into conservation without even knowing it!
There was always a thermos full of hot coffee for her and Dad to drink as they drove along. One of them would use the red lid from the red plaid thermos for a cup and the other one would use a cup from home. Also, there was this little retractable tin cup that we had in the “dash” and that is what I drank water out of. I don’t know what ever happened to that cup, but it traveled with us for many years. Inevitably, Mom would always spill coffee on her lap before the day was over. There were also other necessities in the dash….a container of toothpicks, a box of matches, a flashlight, some Band-Aids, little shakers of salt and pepper, and the best of all…a small roll of toilet paper. Because back then, there were not as many roadside rests as there are now, and if you did find one, it was usually just an outhouse (and no paper in sight). And sometimes, we would have to go on the side of the road somewhere and we had to be prepared!
We drove on and by the end of the first day, we were tired but having a nice trip. We slept in the car, Mom on the back seat, Dad on the front seat and a makeshift bed was made for me on the back floorboard. Mom stacked pillows and blankets on each side of the hump on the floor so that it was even across and then put a blanket over top of them to make my bed. Dad slept just a few hours and then he was up and driving some more.
The second morning, we actually stopped at a diner and ordered breakfast inside. I was excited and still to this day, I can remember the look and smell and feel of sitting there and having a waitress come over to take our order. She was dressed in a uniform similar to the ones on the TV show "Alice" with the aprons and a little cap. The menus were just white paper and very plain and there were simple choices. I got bacon, eggs, toast and juice. Back then, orange juice came in 4oz. size glasses…little tiny things. And there were little jellies and jams in small sealed containers and I had never seen anything like that!
(…At home, jelly came in jars that Mom had worked very long and hard on while canning. We would all go berry picking in the woods and come home with chigger bites (which meant a bath in that wonderful smelling Lysol!) and we’d be all hot and sweaty in our long sleeved shirts and pants in the middle of summer! Had to dress that way to keep from getting scratched all to pieces in the briars. Then the berries would be cleaned to get all the bugs out of them and Mom would cook them on the stove and add sugar and pectin to get it to jell. Then we would enjoy wonderful tasting blackberry jam and jelly all year long! Sometimes when you opened a jar that was brought up from the cellar, it would have a rim of mold on top and Mom would say, “that won’t hurt you” as she scooped it out with a spoon. I guess she was right because we are still alive!)
…So breakfast in a restaurant was amazing to me. Mom and Dad had coffee with their breakfast. And I remember that Dad was intimidated by the experience and he had Mom order for him when the waitress came to the table. We were not accustomed to eating out and he got a little rattled when he tried to decide what he wanted to order.
When it came time for lunch, we stopped at a little city park somewhere. We had stopped at a grocery store and bought bologna and bread and drinks. There were a lot of kids playing in the park and most of them were black children, which I am not sure I had seen up to this point in my life. I know that sounds strange, but there were no black people in the Village of Oak Hill and I had not gone to school with any in grade school. And at 9 years old, school and church was where I’d met everyone that I knew. Some of the kids ventured over to our picnic table to see what we were doing. I think they were as curious of the white family and little blonde girl as we were of them! Mom offered them something to eat and drink but I can’t remember if they accepted or not. But they were very friendly and they all smiled at us a lot.
Soon we were back on the road. I was quickly learning to become Dad’s map-reader. He explained what the lines and icons on the map meant and showed me how to look for the exits we needed and so on. Mom wasn’t the greatest person on directions. But after this trip, I knew everything about maps and now I can go anywhere and I never get upset if I get misplaced (I have never been lost, just misplaced!). I have a very good sense of direction and I know it didn’t come from Mom! On this trip, we would end up going through 12 states.
Back on the road and traveling, we saw lots of scenery. We saw the Arch in St. Louis, and sky scraper buildings. We were on huge highways that we had never driven on before. We saw miles of wheat and cornfields in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska. We drove into the mountains of Colorado and saw the snow-capped tops, which was amazing to think of how hot it was and then see snow! When we drove up into the Rocky Mountains, I got out and played in the snow and Mom took a picture of me making a snowball and throwing it at the camera and I had on a pink shorts outfit. We moved on through Wyoming where there were wide-open ranges for miles and miles. We drove through Salt Lake City and then into the desert, which looked like miles and miles of salt on the ground. Then in Nevada, there were more miles of tumbleweed and cactus.
One night, we tried to sleep inside the car, somewhere in the mountains. It was very hot and humid and the mosquitoes were really bad. We had the windows cracked but the mosquitoes were eating us up. I remember being afraid that a bear or mountain lion might come and eat us in the night. I don’t know if I told anyone that or if I kept it to myself. But I was no dummy…I had seen enough of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and I knew that Marlin Perkins and his sidekick, Jim saw lots of bears and mountain lions in the mountains, and they were usually hungry!
The next day we were driving through the mountains and there was snow on the ground. Here it was July and hot but up in the mountains, there was still snow on the ground. I remember thinking how strange this was and then we stopped the car and Mom took a picture of me throwing a snowball, dressed in shorts and sandals!
On the fourth day, we arrived in California. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, which was an awesome sight for a nine-year old to see. I still have photos I took with my camera of that bridge from the back window of the car. We ate breakfast at a huge restaurant and I distinctly remember the name of it and the logo. It was called "Sambos" and the logo on the sign was a black boy with big lips and a tiger at his side. That would be totally unacceptable today, but we didn’t think anything about it then. They had the best breakfasts I ever had. Lots of pancakes and sausages and they had something called hash brown potatoes, which we had never had. The way Mom figured it, they had boiled the potatoes and then shredded them on a hand shredder into a hot greased skillet. And they were sooo good! After we came home, Mom would make them sometimes and I loved them.
By late afternoon we were close to Ralph’s and we were getting tired of life on the road. We were almost to the exit for Ralph’s home and Mom was telling Dad, “you need to exit up here…..uh…..right…uh…..YOU MISSED IT!” So we had to go further and find a way to get off the huge highway and back on it in the right direction. People were driving a hundred miles an hour. The posted limit at the time was 85 mph, if you can believe that! Poor Dad had never driven over 50 mph in his life, I don’t think. It was a rat race to us. So we got back on track and found the exit and soon we were pulling into Ralph’s apartment. It was a good feeling to finally arrive.
While we were there, they took us to the zoo and lots of different places. I got to play with my nephew and neice, Billy and Ronda, who were only 3 and four years younger than me. We took pictures of Ralph in his sailor uniform and I still have that photo sitting out today. He was so handsome and I was proud to have him for a brother. Even though I didn’t really understand what the military did, I knew it was an important job.
We stayed for several days and then it was time to load up and go home. I had a severe sore throat and a temperature, so I felt horrible. I think it was my first bout with strep throat ever. Ralph and Betty gave me some big pink disk-like pills to suck on and they helped. I was better about two days into the drive home.
We got home all in one piece and it was the longest trip I ever took. Later, we would visit Ralph in Norfolk and Bonnie in Minnesota. The trip to California is a good memory for me and I am glad I was able to do that with my parents.
Even though it rained a lot while we were there, we were able to see the sunset once or twice that Dad had held in his memories from his bachelor days. A sight my dad had seen 30-some years earlier still had the same allure in 1965 and it was still beautiful…all the golds and purples and oranges were there and remain a part of my memory forever.
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California or Bust
