Road Trip to Oregon... We Drove Through a Tree

When Diane was six months old, we visited Daddy's brother, Uncle Luther, in Corvallis, Oregon. In the old cream-colored Chrysler, we drove up the west coast. We could see the ocean along the way. It was beautiful.

We had disposable diapers for Diane for that trip. Unlike the modern diapers, those were flat, about a quarter inch thick, I'd say about 11 by 14 inches with plastic on the back side of them and you had to fasten them with safety pins just like regular diapers. That was disposable diapers in 1957. Normally, people only used them for a road trip. I have no idea what they cost, but even rich people probably used cloth diapers normally. Rich people probably had servants to do their laundry in those days, or a diaper service. Not ever having been rich, nor closely connected to anyone who was, I'm not sure about that. (To us, rich people were the ones who lived on Terrace Avenue.)

As I told you in a previous post, youngest brother Richard, who was six by that time, had lost his front seat privileges because Diane claimed that spot. We had a "car seat" of sorts, attached to metal U-shaped "hooks" that attached on to the back of the front seat; but Diane never stayed in that very long at a time. She wanted to either sit on Mama's lap or stand up facing back to the four of us in the back seat and try to climb over or cry. Sometimes she wanted to "help" Daddy drive, but in those mountains, going around those narrow, treacherous curves, he lobbied for her to be put in the back seat with us. If Diane came to the back seat, we others would take turns sitting in the front with our parents. All this without any seat belts whatsoever. No one we knew had seat belts in those days.

In Corvallis, Oregon, we met our Uncle Luther. I don't remember much about him; he looked somewhat like Daddy, but much older. (Daddy was the youngest of ten children in his family.)

I do remember his wife, Aunt Helen. She had white sheets covering all the furniture in the living room. Every day (literally, every day) she washed those sheets in bleach, wrung them out, and hung them out to dry, ironed them, and repeated the process the next day. And after every meal, she would not let Mama or me help with the dishes, because she had her own special way of washing them. Here's the process: She would sprinkle Tide (the granule kind of washing detergent) in a little pile on the counter. She would put about two inches of water in the dishpan and dip her fingers in it, and then in the dry granules of the Tide. Carefully, she would rub the dishes one at a time back and front. Then she would rinse the dish under a tiny stream of running water in the sink. I'm not sure how she handled pots and pans. Since she also constant shoo'd us out of her kitchen, I only got a peek at it now and then. The whole process was amazing to me.

On the whole, I thought Oregon was very beautiful and cool. (Literally a lot cooler than the hot San Joaquin Valley of California). On the way home a few days later, we traveled through the Sequoias and even drove through that huge redwood tree that has a garage sized and shaped hole cut through it at ground level so you could drive a long, low and wide car typical of the '50's through it. California, I thought, had a lot of interesting things, too.

I would love to hear comments of those who have driven through that redwood tree. Or do they even have that anymore...?