A Forty-niner Travels to California - Part 1

Our first big motor trip was in 1949. I was nine years old and it was to be the big event in my life for a long time afterward. I marked events as being either before or after the California trip. Dad was the secretary and manager of the Moose Lodge in Kokomo. He had taken the job three years before, and was to remain in that position for more than thirty years. I literally grew up in the Moose. The Lodge had its annual convention in Chicago every other year. That was because Moose Heart, the orphanage the organization supported, lay just a few miles south of Chicago. In 1949 the convention was held in San Francisco, so Dad and Mom planned a cross-country motor trip. I don’t remember how long we were gone - it seemed like the whole summer, but brother Don said it was only two or three weeks. I still have difficulty in comprehending how we were able to squeeze so many experiences into such a sparse amount of time.

I was too young to track our route, but I know we left Kokomo in a two car caravan heading west. We would have passed through Illinois, but whether we swung north through Wisconsin and Minnesota or on west into Iowa has been lost to me. I remember the first night on the trip. We stopped that evening and rented a cabin. It was flat country and a railroad track passed near the cabins. Don and I stood outside that evening watching a steam engine pull a freight train across the prairie. It was a warm summer end-of-day, and the sun was going down behind the train - a moving silhouette against a darkening blue sky. The Locomotive sang a forlorn tune as a ribbon of smoke trailed behind its stack. Two hobos sat on top of one of the last boxcars, their legs dangling over the side. That looked like so much fun. They seemed so free and carefree as they sat up there watching the land roll by, and then they were gone. That night I noticed the sheets and blankets smelled different. They weren’t like the ones we had at home. Eventually though, we started across South Dakota. Whitey and Idabel Cook accompanied use in their new Studebaker convertible. I'm not certain of their last name any longer, but Cook seems right. They were a married couple, affiliated with the Moose, and accompanied us all the way to California. We passed through the Bad Lands, where they charged as much for a glass of water as they did for a Coke, the Black Hills that didn‘t really seem black; Mount Rushmore to view the larger than life faces of four past Presidents; on to a place called Custer’s Last Stand; and finally to Dinosaur Park to gawk at life sized statues of ancient beasts cast in cement. I look at a map and notice that all those points of interest lay near Rapid City, South Dakota, so I guess we probably stuffed them all into a couple days of power-point sight-seeing. GO TO: Part 2