#1937RoadTrip, Part 1

"Jeannette was going to a party that night and asked me to go. We met about 10 other cars at North Reading Baptist and went to a farm. I gathered it was a birthday surprise party. I was surprised to see an elderly man meet us with a shot gun ready for action!"

"He laughed as he put it [the shotgun] away when he found the young people of the church marching up to him. I found out he was Will Balcom, one of my cousins! It was a grand party, we didn't get home until midnight."

"We went to grandma's old home and met cousin Bion Murray, his wife Luella, and his daughter Katherine, who is just my age. She had been in the field all day driving the team for haying. Gee, all the kids get pressed into work around here."

"Grandpa got to telling me about Grandma -how she used to come out on that porch to see him on Sunday evenings, and how they went to young people's meetings together and what a long drive it was to her house from where he lived!"

"This visiting was all very nice, but I wished we were going to be here so longer so that we wouldn't have to make the visits so short and pile them up so fast. Daddy and I sat like bumps on logs, because folks knew Grandpa and Mother, but we're strangers."

In WV, "we passed innumerable villages marked "unincorporated." One of these, Red City, was a gov't city that has been started for the unemployed who had lost farms. Our first site of Charleston was not favorable. We went through miles of crowded narrow streets."

"There was no one home at Uncle Charlie's though we waited long. Some neighbors showed us the way to where old friend's of daddy's lived. We wound our way around the hills and discovered the more elite of the city. There were some beautiful homes."

"Daddy remembered Oak Hill as being a little one-horse burg with not much besides a general store, post office, bank, and school, and was unprepared for the shock of finding a thriving city. As his wonder increased, his vocab decreased to 'Gosh!' and 'My golly!'"

"We drove out to the old high school he used to go to. He found very few people he knew in the town, most of them old folks. Of the young ones, several had gone to war and never returned, some had died in a severe flu epidemic, and others had moved away."

"We passed the coal mine where Granddaddy has worked the transfers taking the coal off the cars. At Mount Hope we found the Dickinson Family, our first set of southern relatives. Their house was a mansion. Uncle Bob was Granddaddy's uncle and a living image of him."

"It had been a long day-especially for Daddy. I have never seen him so excited before-he seemed almost like a different person in the way he acted, talked, and laughed. He had come back to a strange home after twenty-three years."

"The Alleghenies were such old, smooth, worn-off mountains that one would hardly realize he was going through mountains-and was it hot! We took a side trip to see the great Natural Bridge, advertised on billboards as one of the 7 wonders of the world."

"We were completely unprepared to be asked for $1.10 each! 'Well!' we thought, 'this bridge must be pretty good It better be!' Then we came upon it-it was beautiful and wonderful-but the $1.10 each kind of spoiled it."

"It was late afternoon when we started over the famous Blue Ridge Mountains, awfully hot, tired, and sticky. Up a little ways we felt a steady, cool, delicious, refreshing breeze. We perked up like wilted lettuce in the refrigerator."

"As we got away from the mountains, we looked back and saw why they were called 'Blue Ridge.' The sun had just dropped behind them, leaving them shrouded in this deep purple-blue haze, crowned with a lovely golden glow. The sight was very satisfying."

"These people had surprisingly little. They envied Mother's and my short hair. They knew there were such things as cameras, but had never seen one before. I had to explain just how mine worked, they watched wide-eyed while I changed rolls and took pictures."

"Aunt Florence was really excited with our visit and insisted we stay for dinner. We agreed and said we only wanted a sandwich. But she killed and fried a chicken. Daddy wondered if she did all that when we asked for a sandwich, what she'd do if we were hungry!'"

"We headed for Grand Caverns and stepping through the door into the mouth of the cave was like walking into an ice box. It was far more magnificent than our imaginations had pictured. From the caverns we took the much-recommended Skyline Drive."