Vacations

While living on Grove Street, I used a week of my annual vacation for a camping trip to Kings Canyon National Park with my friend Jim Cosgrave. Such excursions had been a part of his life experience, growing up in the Fresno area. I think he was desirous of having company in a reliving of his boyhood experienced. I don’t think he had a car of his own at the time — he borrowed the rather elderly Plymouth sedan belonging to his parents.

I can’t say that the trip was one of my fonder recollections — mostly I was just along and parts of it I just endured. One of the less fond parts was an overnight hike we made, packing along sleeping bags, food, etc., over a pass of about 10,000 feet elevation and back the following day. It was probably the only time in my adult life when I went a whole week without shaving (after I had started shaving regularly) and I remember how good it felt to dispense with a week’s accumulation of whiskers.

I believe I have mentioned that during the war years I would use my vacation time for a trip back to the Midwest. I guess I needed to return to the familiar place of my early days and to be with family once again. My recollection is that I continued to do this (except for the camping trip I wrote about in the preceding paragraph) until the time of my marriage.

These trips were always by train, though by the time I had moved north to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was using the faster City of San Francisco for the trip. Instead of the 2-1/2 or 3 days on the slow Challenger, the elapsed time for the journey would be more like 36 hours. During all these trips I was never back in the Midwest really in the wintertime — the closest I ever came to experiencing the snow and cold of an Iowa winter was a year when I was back at Thanksgiving time. I dimly recall from that trip a walk out through the south forty across the stubble of a corn field after the corn had been picked.

Road Trips

I overlooked discussing one aspect of my life in the late 1940s and that is the various car trips I was fortunate to be asked on, by Shell friends who had cars. The principal benefactors in this were Hugh Guthrie (whom I had known slightly at the university but who had become a good friend starting in Wilmington days and more so in San Francisco and Emeryville) and Bob Overcashier.

One trip I took with High there were just the two of us. He asked my to go along with him on a Christmas trip to visit his parents, who were living on a farm near Chehalis, Washington. Christmas Eve at Shell those days was only nominally a half day of work and even the morning was largely characterized by people roaming around, extending holiday greetings, etc. So Hugh and I left well before noon for the drive north.

We stopped briefly in Dunsmuir for something to eat at the home of a college friend of Hugh’s (then a dentist in this small northern California town). We then proceeded to drive all night, arriving at the home of Hugh’s parents early on Christmas day. Needless to say we went right to bed for some rest. I guess we took the road through Klamath Falls but I have no specific recollection that we did — I suspect that Hugh would not have attempted the route over Siskiyou Pass. [This was well before the interstate highway system existed.—LS] The trip was not without incident — somewhere near Klamath Falls we slipped off the road but fortunately someone came along and aided us to get back on the road.

I had completely forgotten about this until Hugh mentioned it when Jean and I had supper one evening with Hugh and Betty, his wife, during one of our visits to Palma’s. My recollection of the trip was one of snowy roads and lowering skies throughout the few days we stayed in Chehalis. One day Hugh, I and at least one other person nominally went duck-hunting (Hugh and I without hunting licenses). I guess I held a shotgun — I know I did not shoot it. In fact I don’t think any shots were fired at all. I was relieved when the excursion was over.

On another trip there were several cars and we visited the redwood parks south of Eureka. On this trip we had sleeping bags along and though we were not supposed to, slept on the ground beneath the towering trees. The cars were just driven off the road into positions where they were hidden from the road.

The two trips that Bob Overcashier invited me on were to Mt. Lassen park and up the Feather River Canyon. My vivid recollection of Lassen park was the high snow cuts (well above the car-top level) along the road; this was the case though it was the Fourth of July weekend. My other recollections of Lassen park and the Feather River Canyon are quite vague except for the scenic qualities of the areas. On both of these trip with Bob we were accompanied by a summertime employee at the Berkeley lab, whose name I no longer remember.