Family Vacations

Our car was new that year but it did develop a minor trouble on the way. A small piece of sand got into one of the rear wheel bearings and while it didn’t impair the car’s operation it was an annoying click periodically when the wheels turned. When we were in Gowrie I took it into Art Soderbeck’s Plymouth garage and had the bearing replaced. Then there were several car agencies in Gowrie, all with repair facilities — quite different from the present state of affairs when I don’t know how much repair work if any is done.

Although we would many years use at least part of the vacation time for a trip back east to see my parents, we also made many trips around California and spent time at various places just to let the girls play and for Jean and me to relax. One place we went several times was the Meeks Bay Resort on the California side of Lake Tahoe. We would have a cabin on the shore of the lake and it was an ideal place for the children to play in the water.

How we learned of the place I’m not sure but it may have been from our next-door neighbors the Weeks (Claude and Grace) who I seem to recall had a summer cabin there. In fact I think we looked them up one when we were there. Claude had an oil station on Fairmount Avenue not far from us and as he did automotive repair work we often used him for various work that needed to be done as well as periodic service work.

I recall one than Jean’s dad’s big Chrysler had a dead battery down at the El Cerrito Plaza — why he was there I can’t remember but it may have been a Masonic Lodge meeting. Anyway he called up and asked me to push him to get him started. It was a job for the yellow Plymouth to push the Chrysler and I had to do it in low gear. Afterward I couldn’t get it to shift up into intermediate or high gear. Claude fixed the car for us; I suppose he had to replace some parts in the Plymouth’s gearbox.

I was a little irked that Jean’s dad didn’t offer to recompense for the repairs on the Plymouth.

Another place that we visited several years for a week during the summer months was the Lair of the Bear, a family camp up in the Sierras off Highway 50 that was operation for the California alumni association. The accommodations were tent cabins as I recall with toilet and bath facilities separate. Here meals were served and there was some evening entertainment and organized daytime activities. I believe there was a swimming pool.

I suppose it was a reasonably good vacation experience but I really didn’t enjoy it, and besides it was really chilly getting up in the morning in the unheated cabin. It was also not a particularly friendly place, people tended to sort of separate into cliques. We did meet one family that we have kept in touch with over the years — the Kennys — who lated moved to Canada in Ontario, and whom we visited there in 1977 when Jean and I had our driving tour around the periphery of the U.S.

On one of our stays at the Lair, Ray and Alta happened to be camping near the lair in their trailer, and we looked them up for a visit. During that period Ray was still actively fishing from time to time, mostly stream fishing. Earlier on he and a dentist friend went salmon fishing in the ocean on the dentist’s boat, but this activity ceased when Ray started to get seasick when out on the boat.

Ray belonged to an organization called the Rod and Gun Club during the period when our daughters were young, and this group would on occasion go “clamming” over along the coast in Marin County. I recall these excursions with fond memories. The clams at Bolinas or Tomales Bay were the horse neck clams that required a lot of digging. These were large clams and Ray would taken them back and “clean” them which was putting them in a bucket of water with cornmeal in the water and the clams would irrigate the sand out of their systems, replacing it with cornmeal. After this had gone on for a day or so the clams would be harvested for their meat. Jean would use our share to make a kind of clam pie that I always enjoyed.

We also went clamming for the smaller cockleshell clams at another location, a rocky beach which was their habitat. On one of these occasions I saw one of the “clammers” break open one of the small clams and eat the clam meat raw. I don’t think I could, or would, have done that.

Sometimes the clamming trips were family outings but I think sometimes Ray and I went alone. I can well remember on one of the cockleshell trips seeing the well-bundled-up girls sitting on the rocky beach eating the picnic lunch we had brought with us. As a fisherman, Ray was interested in trying to get our daughters into fishing and through him we got two of them probably Muriel and Palma, fishing rods. But they didn’t have much interest, probably we were not very often in a situation where they could be used.

About the only time I can recall when they were used was once when we spent some vacation time at Mammoth Lakes in the eastern slope of the Sierras. On that trip we all went “fishing” at one of the mountain lakes, but no fish were caught. I tried my hand also but with no success. We still had the fishing rods when we moved to Ashland and we finally disposed of them to a local family.

I don’t think it was the time we went to Mammoth Lakes, but sometime or other we also made a trip to Death Valley. On this trip we visited “Scotty’s Castle” in the valley. This is a privately owned enclave in the public area (park or monument or whatever) and was staffed and operated by as hard-eyed and mafia-like group of individuals as I think I’ve ever encountered. We talked to the ranger on the way out and I got the impression that the park service would have liked to have had them out of the valley.

It was on this trip that we stopped at an “antique” store where I saw old Musterole bottles for sale — this had been my dad’s remedy for his “sick headaches” and the sift of the jugs was quite nostalgic.

We stayed at a motel in the valley and it was here that the shower room had a little aperture in the ceiling — it looked like access to a crawl space above the room. Our daughters started to play at throwing a wash rag at the opening and succeeded in getting one through it do that it didn’t come back. It was on the trip to Death Valley that we also visited the parents of Jean’s friend Bea Willard where they lived in Lone Pine. That was their winter residence, in summer they had a cabin in the Mammoth Lakes area — we also visited them there at one time.