There was always turmoil in our house but one place where there wasn’t any was while we were on vacation.
Vacations were great except just as we drove away from the house. Mom and Artie would immediately begin arguing when we got in the car because Mom would remember something she forgot, and Artie wanted to get going! So, we kids sat in the back of the station wagon that was long as the Queen Mary and heard every word of the disagreement in the front seat. Artie would say we don’t need it, but Mom would insist, and he’d go back to the house angry as all shit and when we got going again there would be tension.
But once we left the city limits and made progress things settled down because there was the open road before us and all sorts of things to distract us as we drove along. Mom would say Art keep your eyes on the road and Artie would ignore her. He’d be looking here and there at whatever interested him but he never got us in trouble because he was a really good driver. I suppose he got his skills flying airplanes and you have to be competent to fly one of those or you’re dead meat.
We didn’t have cell phones, of course, so the only thing that was available to us was looking out the window. Reading a book was out of the question because I would get motion sickness and that was not fun. We played a game that we made up which was “I Get Those Horses!” This was simply keeping an eye out for a horse or horses and then yelling out “I Get Those Horses!” You kept a tally of how many you saw and when we arrived at our destination the winner had the satisfaction of winning having seen the most horses. No prizes, nothing. Just satisfaction.
When it was warm we’d drive along with the back window of the station wagon rolled down and we kids would be in the back with the seat folded down. If mom had brought bread along to make sandwiches with, she’d let us have slices of the bread which was usually some white bread like Wonder bread. We’d tear off little pieces, wad it into balls and throw the wadded-up bread balls out the back window to watch them bounce on the pavement as we sped away. Can you imagine kids doing this nowadays?
When we were older and could read, we’d keep our eyes peeled for strange and unusual license plates. This was only on an interstate highway like Interstate 80. State highways were only traveled by state cars. If we saw one from New York or California, well, that was pretty thrilling. I don’t know if this made us smarter or anything because we weren’t glued to a cell phone screen, so you tell me. Were kids smarter back then because they had to entertain themselves?
Some vacations we drove to Mom’s mom in Illinois and some to Artie’s mom in Ohio. There weren’t interstate highways at the time, only two-lane highways, so we drove on Highway 30 which would now be considered “the back way” through DeWitt and Clinton, Iowa and over the Mississippi River on a bridge as tall as a skyscraper. Highway 30 was originally known as the “Lincoln Highway” and it was the first coast to coast highway in America. Right through the middle of little old Marshallberg.
Once we got into Illinois you would see off in the distance the giant slag piles from mining which looked like volcanoes. Otherwise, Illinois was flat as a pancake and boring as heck. When we went all the way to Ohio we would go through Gary, Indiana where there were steel mills going full blast day and night and that made the air stink to high heaven of sulfur. The sky was lit up orange at night. It was like driving through hell. No, really. We peered out the windows of the car as we drove along appalled and amazed. How could people live here? How could people work there? When Interstate 80 was built we skirted that whole area, so I don’t know if it’s still like that.
Then there were the Indiana and Ohio turnpikes where every few miles we would have to stop and pay a toll. You drove up to the gate at the toll booth and gave the toll taker a few coins. Howard Johnson restaurants were at rest stops along the highways, but Artie would only stop for potty breaks, never for meals! He frustrated the heck out of me. He just wanted to get there wherever “there” was. He made it no fun at all. Howard Johnson’s! It was a siren call to us kids bored out of our minds in the back seat of The Long Station Wagon. They had cool food in the restaurant. I knew it! They also had souvenirs and shelf upon shelf of candy and snacks! I knew this, too, but it would be years and me growing up to finally check it out and then I found that it was not the least bit interesting and overpriced for what you got. But back then we thought it was so cool and wonderful.
When we first started going to Artie’s mom, Grandma Daisy, she lived in Warren, Ohio. She lived in a big brick house with a porch as wide as the house. There was a cuckoo clock at one end of the living room and we kids would sit in front of it waiting for the cuckoo to come out. We were easily entertained! She had a nice cocker spaniel and a cat she called “Tagger” which was how she pronounced tiger. Gramma was kind of a hillbilly, and this came out in various ways. She was prejudiced against everybody who wasn’t white. She called black people “coons” and Chinese people “slants”. She was even prejudiced against people of her own family and cussed out anybody who disagreed with her. When I think about it, she was very much like Mamaw in our Vice President’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”. She hated my mom, and lord knows why, but I suspect that it was because Mom took her beloved son Art away from her. She was also a college educated person which would have been an anathema to her so very unlike the people she was comfortable with.
Gramma had suffered at the hands of her first husband, Artie’s dad, Ed. He was a mean sunnavabitch who would come home drunk and beat the shit out of her. I don’t know if she got the chip on her shoulder from living with him or if she was always that way. Anyway, she doted on my dad and would get him out of school when he was a kid to accompany her on her many doctor appointments. She was a hypochondriac. Eventually she divorced him and married Ephraim Whitaker, also known as Ed. He was from Kentucky and was a wonderful human being. For one thing he had a great sense of humor and maybe that helped him get along with our cantankerous Gramma Daisy. He had lost one of his fingers in a machine shop accident and he joked around with us pretending to lose that finger and we laughed and laughed. He had a pack of marvelous coon hounds, and he would go out with them to hunt raccoons.
Later on, Grandma Daisy and Grampa Ed moved to a farm in the country near Cortland, Ohio. There she and Ed lived in a giant white two-story house with a beautiful veranda. It had been a boarding house and had 4 large apartments. Why was there such a large house in the middle of the fields with no town nearby? Maybe it was for field hands and their families because the house was just down the lane from a gigantic dairy barn. Daisy and Ed lived in one of the apartments and when we visited, we stayed in one of the others. I don’t know why but the other apartments were always empty and so was the giant barn.
The barn was now home to only pigeons and mice. I roamed all over it top to bottom as far as I could go. The barn was built on a slope, so the back of the understory was open to the fields where the cows grazed. First, I would go through the understory door into the bottom part where the cows would have been herded in and milked. Cobwebs everywhere and filthy as all get-out. Then I’d walk up a short stairway to the level above where the hay had been kept. This level was at ground level so tractors could drive in and unload the hay. It was like a church cathedral. Up in the rafter pigeons flew back and forth. It was dark and impressive. Pigeon poop everywhere in the old dusty hay.
Out there in the country was a critter paradise. In the lane to the barn after a rain tiny land crabs would be in the ditches where they had built themselves little towers made of pelleted mud to escape being flooded out. Mostly though we hung out in a rowboat on the little pond that was ringed with willow trees. The pond was clogged with duckweed which made it a perfect haven for frogs and crawdaddies. In vain we tried to catch the frogs, but they would disappear beneath the pond weeds as soon as we got close. They were too wily. You would see one and you would try to quietly pole up to it and, bam! It would disappear beneath the surface.
We were successful in catching a crawdad now and then because the little bastards were aggressive and would defend themselves by catching hold and pinching anything we poked at them. We flung them into the boat bottom and then had no idea what to do with them because they were waving those nasty pinchers at us. We eventually got them back into the pond, probably doing the reverse which was letting them pinch the end of a stick and then flinging them back.
Even though Grandma Daisy was a pistol and hard to get along with one thing she had was nice smooth bed sheets. At home our sheets were always rough by comparison. I don’t know why. Maybe Mom bought cheap sheets to economize. I remember those smooth Gramma sheets and how they were so nice to sleep on. Now I always get the best sheets I can afford. What do they say? You spend half your life in bed so you might as well make it comfy. Grandma Daisy inspired me.
Grandma always had Special K cereal with milk for breakfast and oftentimes green beans with bacon for dinner. She cooked the dickens out of the beans until they were nearly mush. She used whatever beans she got from her garden and in her eyes the fool proof way to make them edible was to boil them to death. The bacon made them salty and actually quite tasty, but the texture left something to be desired. She also had giant containers of Metamucil on her counter. Mom said she had diverticulosis/diverticulitis and needed fiber. Mom could never remember which thing she was afflicted with. Maybe grandma should not have cooked the dickens out of the beans so they might have had any fiber left in them. Otherwise, Gramma’s cooking was nothing to write home about. Not like Gramma Frieda whose cooking was always delicious. One time I noticed a bottle of some kind of rotgut wine on the kitchen table. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed it. It was repulsive to my nose and when I looked at the label it said it was bottled a long time ago like an aged wine. I remarked out loud well that explains why it smells so bad. Look how old it is! Everyone laughed their heads off at my innocent remark. I had my first bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich at Grandma Daisy’s. We only had bologna or peanut butter at our house. I never thought that tomatoes, lettuce and bacon on toasted white bread smeared with mayonnaise could taste so good!
When we would visit Daisy and Ed in Cortland the folks would send us off to hang out with Uncle Bob and Aunt Shirley. Uncle Bob was my dad’s older brother. He was a long-haul truck driver, uncouth and crass. He cursed a lot. He would have made a great muleskinner in the old days, and his personality would have suited that rough lifestyle to a “t”. He was like Gramma Daisy in that he was prejudiced against anybody who wasn’t white. He was even prejudiced against some white people like Italians or Irish. He called Italians “dumb dagos” and Irish people “micks”. Of course, he called black people “niggers”. He did not have one lick of remorse for doing this. I don’t know how Aunt Shirley put up with him. Actually, later on she didn’t and they divorced. Thankfully we didn’t have to hang out with him much. Instead, we hung out with Aunt Shirley. She was a super nice person, pretty and kept an immaculate household. Why is it that the nicest women are very often with the most unpleasant men? Our cousins Sandy and Ricky were quite a bit older than us, and we did not see them very much. Only Ricky really. I have no idea where Sandy was off to. Ricky was in his late teens and had a summer job baling hay. In those days the bales were bucked by hand, so he was very, very strong. One night he came in and showed up at the bedroom door to say hi. Toni and I squealed as he held out his extremely strong arm at a 90-degree angle and let us take turns hanging off his arm.
In the daytime we messed around in the creek behind their house. It was a beautiful peaceful place overgrown with towering trees that made a canopy over the water. The creek bottom was wide and clear, and the water ran through there and was perfect for splashing in and exploring. After we were done with that, we would troop back to the house. Their two-story brick affair was very different from our modest little one-story house back in Iowa. After lunch I was tasked with helping Aunt Shirley clean up. Once the dishes were done, I noticed that some water had splashed on the floor from the dishwashing and being a helpful child, I took it upon myself to grab one of Aunt Shirley’s cloth towels to wipe it up. Aunt Shirley’s eyes bugged out. Then she laid into me that I had used a HAND towel and not a floor towel. Didn’t I know how unsanitary the floor was? I felt so bad! Back at home my mom wasn’t a stickler for those kinds of details. We were uncivilized band of ruffians in Aunt Shirley’s eyes. These girls don’t know the difference between a floor towel and a hand towel!
One vacation we did something really ambitious. We drove all the way to California to visit my mom’s sister LuVerne who lived in Santa Monica, California with her husband Bob and their kids Bette and Brad. We pulled a small house trailer from Iowa through Nebraska then Kansas and into the panhandle of Texas. From there it was all the way through New Mexico and Arizona to arrive in California. We pulled into Kansas in the dark and when I woke up and looked out the window, I was flabbergasted. The horizon was absolutely flat and featureless! Not even a tree! Just grass as far as the eye could see. I could hardly believe my eyes and I’ve never seen anything quite like it since although I’ve always wanted to. Maybe the Llano Estacado in West Texas is like that.
Western Kansas goes on forever
In the Texas panhandle we drove through the worst thunderstorm I had ever been in, even worse than the Iowa thunderstorms which were absolutely in a class all their own, so you know the Texas storm was a storm to end all storms. This thunderstorm made the Iowa thunderstorms seem wimpy. The lightning bolts were huge and seemed to hit right next to the car as we sped along in the dark and downpour. I was grateful my dad had experience flying airplanes into France during WWII where I’m sure they got strafed by ground to air fire. Driving in a furious thunderstorm was probably similar but less risky. The air had a weird smell to it. Artie said it was burned air and he called it ozone. I don’t know how he knew this. Of the lightning Artie said, “Don’t worry. We’re in a car with rubber tires so if the lightning hits us it will travel into the ground.” Somehow that didn’t console me. Anyway, right or wrong, that’s what he said.
After the thunderstorm ended, we arrived in Amarillo, Texas and Artie was on a mission to find pinto beans. He had a thing about beans. Well, I did, too because he made the best beans in the world from scratch which I could eat and eat and eat. He called them Shanty Beans and they were made with great northern beans or navy beans and baked in a casserole for hours with only a little onion and salt pork for seasoning. They were from a family recipe that came from Canada. Years later I would see articles about the food a lumberjack might eat and sure enough those beans were a on the menu. So here we were in Amarillo and being a Hispanic community Artie knew they would have pinto beans and he had to have some. I guess they were not available in Marshalltown or maybe he just wanted authentic ones from the land where they were common. We drove up to a little, what looked like, Mexican grocery store, parked the car in the parking lot sopping wet from the storm and Artie got out of the car and went in. He came back out with a big smile on his face and a giant bag of beans cradled in his arms.
From then on all we had to entertain us was throw bread out the rolled down back window and watch it bounce. Bounce, bounce, bounce until you couldn’t see it anymore. Years later I would call Wonder bread white Styrofoam because I was a hippie and into whole natural foods. Dad poo-pooed the whole grain bread I endorsed. He said your bread has too much flavor.
All this car travel was without benefit of seat belts by the way. It’s a wonder we survived into adulthood and I’m not joking. We did a lot of things back then that are now considered dangerous.
• Eating food cooked in aluminum pans.
• Rolling raw mercury around in our hands and applying mercurochrome to wounds (it has mercury in it).
• Spraying asbestos onto the Christmas tree to make it look like snow.
• Paint the house with lead-based paint.
• Filling the tank with gas that had lead in it.
• The county sprayed DDT around our homes to kill mosquitos.
Then, of course there were all the dangerous games and equipment we played on:
• Teeter totters: when someone was in the air, the person on the bottom would jump off and the person at the top would come crashing down.
Yeah, do it. I double dog dare you to jump off.
• Evil Knieval style bike riding off makeshift plywood jumps.
• Riding loose in the back of a pickup truck
• Jarts aka Lawn Darts
Traveling west on route 66 we pulled over at a way station in the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest of Arizona. I saw my first horned toad lizard and chased it until I was able to catch it. I wanted to keep it, but Mom made me let it go. In the Petrified Forest we picked up small pieces of petrified wood that we would keep as souvenirs without thinking about the consequences. Years later, in 2021, when we were driving through on our western trip with our Long Trailer, we found that the park service now had signs posted everywhere “Stealing is illegal” and check points at the exits were there to search your car for purloined petrified wood. By the way Holcomb, Arizona seems to have more petrified wood than the park itself. Holcomb needs the wood because there was nothing else there to recommend it. Big chunks of petrified trees on every corner and I suppose they are one of the reasons the park now has laws. We, in our ignorance, surely contributed to the law imposed in the Petrified Forest. We were thoughtless in taking bits of petrified rocks.
In the Mojave Desert outside of Needles, California we stopped at a gas station late at night and in the dark a hot dry wind blew. The pavement was still hot enough that my rubber flip flops started to melt and stick. It was weird to experience that hot wind. I wondered how anyone could live out there. I can still feel what it felt like all these years later and when I’ve been through the Mojave in recent years, I still wonder how anyone can live there. I suppose it’s cheap and that would be for a good reason. It has terrible weather. I mean, terrible all year long.
When we finally started to get near Los Angeles I could see that the air ahead was orange. These were the days before pollution control, and it was nasty. Once you got into the smog cloud you wouldn’t notice it, and no one seemed to be upset about what they were breathing. It kills me to listen to people denying climate change and wanting to roll back regulations on emissions. I guess they grew up where the air was clear or are too young to remember how bad it was.
In Santa Monica the air had an interesting scent to it that I later figured out was partly the scent of the ocean and eucalyptus and partly smog. In the back yard a mockingbird sang its heart out day and night. At the beach we played in the waves and in the sand. Mom herded us around like we were little land crabs.
On another vacation we drove to Havre, Montana to visit Mom and Artie’s friend from their Chicago days. I don’t remember his name, but I remember a little about Havre and a lot about how we got there. Havre, Montana is literally a few miles from the Canadian border and is a nothing little town. Sorry about saying that but it’s true. I know this because in 2021 Marty and I drove through it on our big loop from California through the west with our travel trailer. The only thing I remember about Havre from when I was a kid is that it rained a lot. I remember the dark apartment of the friend. Nothing much else registered.
What does register were the many places we visited on the way there. I remember Mt. Rushmore shrouded in clouds so you could barely see the giant faces way up high. Lincoln looked like he was crying because of the water dripping down his face. I remember panning for gold in Deadwood, South Dakota and shopping for agates and other souvenirs. Speaking of agates. and remember I was a nerdy little rock hound, near the Custer battlefield monument I found my first wild agate in the field. Oh joy!
On the way to Sheridan, Wyoming but miles before it I saw way off in the distance what seemed to be very low clouds. Suddenly it dawned on me. Was this snow on mountains? Mom, look ahead, are those clouds or is that snow on mountains? The first time I ever saw a snow capped peak was on the Big Horn Mountains near Sheridan, Wyoming.
We camped in Yellowstone National Park near Yellowstone Lake which seemed like an ocean to me. Artie went fishing for trout and because he was a fishing genius, he caught four big trout right away. Once he had them cleaned, though, he called me over and said we can’t eat them because they have liver flukes which he showed me. We left them on the bank for the bears. Speaking of bears, sleeping in a tent became problematic at night in the dark because bears were on the prowl for anything they could find to eat. Toni and I clutched each other in terror as we listened to the snuffling going by outside the tent walls. They sounded like a strange vacuum cleaner. We slept in the car from then on and I’ve never been quite comfortable sleeping in a tent ever since. Something is out there that might come and get you!
When we went on vacations to Illinois to visit Mom’s mom Artie would drive straight through. Same business, Artie behind the wheel on a marathon to “get there”. Then when we arrived at Gramma’s house the first thing Artie would do was ask Gramma to make him a ham sandwich. Man, oh man, Artie loved those sandwiches! Well, truth be told we all did! Gramma made her own bread and cured her own ham so even if it was 1 a.m. we had to eat one before we were allowed to get some sleep. Grandma Frieda’s house was a 2-story house that came from Montgomery Ward, and it was on Oak Street in teeny tiny Watseka, Illinois.
Gramma had her big bedrooms fixed up with queen beds and handmade quilts she made herself. Every once in a while, in the middle of the night, we got woken up by the bed being shaken. At first, I thought it, “It’s a ghost!” but later I figured out that it probably was a big truck on the next street over which was a highway through town. This was never proven, and I don’t believe in ghosts even though my mom and my sister claimed they saw some. I loved to rummage through Gramma’s chest of drawers and look at the stuff she had in there. She had such cool stuff! Aunt Jeanette’s room was off limits and too bad because it was the nicest room in the house. There was a big oak dresser with a filigreed mirror and a big oak bed.
There was only one bathroom in the big house, and it was upstairs. There wasn’t a shower as this was an old-fashioned house and to bathe there was a big claw foot tub. The water coming out of the faucet smelled terrible, like sulfur or iron so Gramma put lilac bubble bath in it to make it smell better. We kids would plunge in there and feel like we were in a swimming pool because the tub could hold a lot of water. The lilac made the water smell better but not a whole lot.
Mrs. Sadie Roberts lived next door in an unpainted clapboard house with a big porch and an upright piano in the living room. She was a very friendly person but looked like a spook with dark circles under her eyes and veins sticking out of her skinny arms. She scared us kids. Poor Mrs. Roberts. She was so nice and told us all about her exploits as a young girl and how her mother was so mad at her when she got her long hair bobbed. It must have been in the Roaring 20s when she did it because she was that old. There was a blackberry patch between Gramma’s house and Mrs. Robert’s house that filled the whole lot from street to alleyway and we kids stuffed our faces with the ones we could reach getting stuck by the thorns but not really caring too much.
One of the best things about Gramma Frieda’s house was the porch swing. We kids would go out there and get on it and swing it ferociously like it was a playground swing. Looking back, it’s wonder that Mom and Gramma did not come out and tell us to swing slower or stop completely. That swing could have come out of its moorings quite easily the way we swung! We would have either catapulted ourselves right off the porch as there was no back railing or onto the floor of the porch itself. Mom and Grandma were both worry warts who rode hard on us kids for everything. They were both sure that disaster lurked around every corner. But for some reason the porch swing was not one of their worries.
Eventually we’d go out to visit the Hurliman’s farm where Aunt Leona and Uncle Louie lived with their 3 kids, Joan, Aaron and Sandi. Sandi was my age because Grandma Frieda’s family was big, and her youngest sister Leona was not much older than my mom. We’d ride the Shetland pony Prince through the corn fields and have big picnics under the elm trees on the front lawn. There’d be potato salad, cole slaw, fried chicken, corn on the cob, pickled ham and corn relish as well as fresh rolls and butter. I don’t know how I didn’t get fat. It must have been all the running around I did. We kids were always on the go.
R L Benoit - Writer/Artist 