Life & Other Problems: Pilgrimage, 1941

In 1941 my parents decided to take my brother and me on a trip through the far western United States. This was a big step for Midwesterners who had never ventured much beyond the states clustered around Lake Michigan. My nine-year old brain couldn’t possibly appreciate what a giant step this was for them.

The prospect of war had begun to stir the country. Most parents weren’t thinking about vacations. But with the trip in mind, the frugal Hoffers had dipped into savings to purchase a new 1941 Chevrolet. They must have reasoned that it could be many years before such a venture would again be possible. My brother Charles was almost twelve. Too soon he would be an adult. Better do it now.

They plotted carefully. We would see as many national parks as possible, explore the Pacific coast and work in a week with Mom’s cousin Lee Bucheim in Orange, California.

Driving through Nebraska heat on two-lane highways, all windows wide open, we delighted in the fact that other drivers honked and waved, called out, “Hey! Michigan!” In Nebraska they didn’t see Michigan licenses all that often.

We rented tourist cabins at four dollars a night, sometimes less. Generally clean, the flimsy cabins all seemed to have creaky floors, sagging beds and drippy sinks. Mom and I shared one double bed, Charles and Dad the other. Motels? Undreamed of.

Some gasoline pumps still had glass globes filled with golden gasoline that bubbled industriously during fill-ups. On average, gasoline was 19 cents a gallon that year.

At Brice Canyon a switchback trail plunged downward. Charles and I jogged to the bottom, so narrow and deep that we could barely see the rim. A tiny stream meandered drunkenly, cooling sculpted arches and tunnels of every conceivable shade of rusty rose-pink. We struggled back up, panting. Charles shouted, “Mom! Dad! you gotta go down there! It’s really something!”

We noticed a man pacing back and forth, very upset. “I left my camera case down there,” he groaned, perspiring visibly even in the dry air. “Tell you what. You kids go get it, and I’ll give you a dime.”

We were off almost before the words were out of his mouth. Trudging back up the trail, we discussed what to do with our new-found wealth. At the top Mom took a Kodachrome shot of us holding the man’s case, the exquisite formations of Bryce visible beyond our red faces and slumped shoulders.

In California we scoffed at tall palm trees sporting meager feather headdresses, so far up that we had to scrunch down in the car to see the top. “Man! Talk about ugly!” we chanted, again and again. Palm trees were supposed to be more or less at eye level, with coconuts and with pretty girls under them.

In Orange, cousins Lee and Rilla Bucheim provided a week’s respite from many days on the road. They took us swimming in the ocean at Huntington Beach and up into the San Bernardino mountains. They particularly wanted to show us a mountain lake. As the car skirted the edge of a little pond, they proudly said, “Isn’t that just the prettiest lake?”

“You call that a LAKE?” I said, bewildered.

“Back home we’d call that a mud puddle!” added Charles. Mom switched on her full-blown dead-eye glare, so he added, “It’s real nice, though. Bet you can catch lots of fish in there.”

She had a few words for us when we got back to Orange that night. I didn’t much care, I was busy admiring one of the highlights of my trip, the pull-chain toilet in the Bucheim bathroom.

Leaving Orange, we went to San Pedro, site of Los Angeles Harbor. Mom took a picture of an oil tanker anchored outside the breakwater. “That’s the first Japanese ship to be refused American oil,” she told us. We glanced up from our project, which was finding out if our Popsicle sticks would have a message on them saying we could get another one for free.

Up on the hill above the harbor workmen were building many smallish concrete structures. “What’cha building?” we asked.

“Bathrooms for mermaids,” they joked. When war broke out the following December my parents realized that those were gun installations.

We stopped to say hello to a distant relative in his dental office in Venice, California. He took us for a drive around the area. Along Ocean Boulevard, which ran adjacent to Ryan Aircraft in Santa Monica, he pointed out the camouflage netting above us, which stretched over the street for many blocks. “That’s up there because of the war,” he said.

War? Our parents had told us that this man struggled with a drinking problem, so we figured he was probably drunk. War? Nah.

Because we had a new car and were taking a six-week trip, some people along the way seemed to think that we were rich. But in our parents’ view the trip was a necessary and valuable part of our education.

And we did learn. We learned through such sights as scaffolding still on the faces at Mt. Rushmore, one-lane gravel roads on the treacherous Bighorn Pass in Wyoming and the partially built Pitt River Bridge, hundreds of feet above us, that would be the road when Shasta Dam was completed.

We saw the wonders of Mesa Verdi, followed shortly by a night-long trip from Las Vegas to California. (You had to cross the Mojave Desert at night; this was long before air conditioning.) Everything was new to us − Old Faithful at Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, the California Redwoods, the Rocky Mountains, all forever fixed in our brains.

When you are a kid, you often don’t know what gifts you are being given. But years later, when my brother and I refer to “our trip” we know exactly what we mean.