Road Trip... Daddy Drove All the Way...

Daddy had been a foot soldier in WWII. Right after the war for about a year he had worked for a friend in Bakersfield who owned a mattress company. He had returned home to Arkansas and worked in the mattress shop in Little Rock several years before his first wife died. When he married my Mama and they decided to go to the west coast, he called his Bakersfield friend, who said, “Come back. I could use your help in my mattress company again.”

The old ’42 Ford with the cardboard window pane was too small to move this big family all the way across country. The word from friends was that a person could “drive a car through” for someone who needed a way to get their car from one side of the country to the other. So Daddy sold the old Ford and arranged to drive a car through.

He also sold most everything else we owned, keeping only the most necessary furniture (mattresses) and equipment (our bikes), dishes, clothes, linens, quilts, and irreplaceable items like old pictures. He bought a red utility trailer and piled everything in it and stacked the bikes on top. We were going to California.

When I came home from school after the last day of fourth grade, a beautiful 1955 Oldsmobile, white in the front, “coral” in the back, was attached to the red trailer and backed up to the steps of the old duplex where we lived. In the style of the ‘50’s the car was long, low, and wide, and had bench seats front and back. In those days cars didn’t have seat belts. I thought it was the most beautiful car I’d ever seen. Too bad we were only “driving it through.” We would have to deliver it to its owner in the Los Angeles area within a week or two.

The house was emptied out and everyone slept on pallets that night after saying goodbye to our relatives and neighbors. We left at first light the next morning, starting out with Richard in the middle of the front seat with Mama and Daddy, and Jim, Ray and me in the back seat. We kids took turns riding in the front with our parents (best deal) and center back (worst deal), or back windows, preferred by the big boys.

At that time I had only been in two states, Arkansas and Mississippi. Well, possibly I had crossed a corner of Louisiana as a baby, but I didn’t remember it. Even at 10 years old, I loved to write. I had planned to list all the states’ license plates as we saw them on the road. As we pulled out of the yard, a car was parked across the street with an Oklahoma license plate. So that was the first state I wrote on my list. Of course, I had to add Arkansas before we reached the highway. By the time we entered California a week or so later, I had recorded not only the six states we traversed, but maybe two dozen others. There were only 48 states in America back then. Alaska and Hawaii had not yet been added.

We settled into a routine of riding, singing, riding, eating, riding, fighting, riding, sleeping, riding… riding… Would it never end? It became a way of life.

Riding… Daddy drove all the way. There were no such things as freeways. This road trip was long before freeways were invented in the South and Midwest. Maybe they had them out in Los Angeles. I’m not really sure they did. The speed limit was 65 at best. We crossed the country on Highway 66. Most of that two thousand plus miles was two-lane highway, one lane each way, lots of curves where you couldn’t pass if the vehicle in front of you was going slower than you wanted to go. There were lots of trucks, and they couldn’t go very fast, especially up hills. The highway went right through towns, with stop signs and red lights, and you had to watch for the signs that told you where to turn to stay on your highway (66). If you didn’t watch the signs, you might end up out in the country somewhere you didn’t want to go. Daddy let Mama help him watch those signs, even though he probably didn’t really need her help.

Mama was the one who needed help. One day when we stopped to eat at a café (there was no such thing as restaurants, to my knowledge—there were only cafés) we went through the routine of ordering, eating, rest-rooming, and getting settled back in the car. It was my turn to sit in front and Mama scooted to the middle and let me sit by the window. We pulled out of there, started down the road, everything pretty smooth and quiet for a few minutes. Suddenly Mama reached down to find her purse, and immediately panicked because it was not there.

“Ohhhh, Clarence,” she was getting teary-eyed, “I must of left my purse at that café…” Her voice was really high and sounded like she was about to cry.

Daddy was quite calm, considering that most of the money and all the important papers were in her purse. “Do you think we should go back to the café and see if someone picked it up?”

By then she was quite pale, her eyes really wide, her long fingers clutching her throat. She didn’t say anything, just nodded, and Daddy quietly pulled off the road far enough that the trucks behind him wouldn’t hit us. We sat there for a minute, everyone thinking that when the traffic would allow, we would just turn around and go back to the café.

Daddy bent over and started fishing around with his left hand under his left leg. Slowly he brought up the purse and looked at her with a great big smile. “You left it on your chair when you took the kids to the bathroom,” he said. “I wondered when you would miss it. When I paid the bill, I don’t know what them folks thought, me carryin’ the purse.”

I loved him for that. No matter what my Mama did or said wrong, nor what mistakes she made in any way, he was never harsh or negative toward her, at least not in front of the kids. I don’t know about their private conversations, but I tend to think he was the same way all the time. He was a good man, good to us, and especially good to Mama.

There were many new sights and sounds and smells along that long road.

But that’s another story…