Hitting the road

It could be argued that my parents are married because my uncles are so tall.  Actually, that jumps in ahead of the fact that they would not have met except that my father and my mother's brother David were missionaries in France together immediately after WWII.  Dad came to visit in Salt Lake, and he was going to Boston to graduate school.  My mother was transferring to Wellesley in the Boston area from the University of Utah, after staying home with her younger brother Bob while he finished high school.  My grandparents were on the road for a year while my grandfather served as president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and they had asked her to postpone her plans.

When Grandpa came home from this gig, he was persuaded to run for the U.S. Senate, and he won.  So here around the kitchen table are two people who need to head to Boston, and two brothers who wanted to visit their folks in D.C.  Road trip! They made a plan and set off to Boston, with the two brothers continuing on to the nation's capitol afterwards.

What does that have to do with being tall?  Well, my two uncles are 6' 7" and 6' 6 1/2" tall, and they could not sit one behind the other in the car.  In the days before bucket seats, if the bench was pushed all the way back for one to be driving, the other had to be next to him.  (And no matter who was in back, they were squished, I imagine.)  That meant that the two traveling student-types were always seated next to each other, front seat or back, for a long trip in the days before freeways.  By the time they arrived in Boston, and were given a cheerful farewell by the continuing travelers, they were beginning to know each other well, and my father was definitely interested in pursuing.

Hmm, with such a happy result from that first undertaking, maybe it's no wonder that we spent a lot of time on major road trips as we grew up. (See here.) Maybe it's just that that was the only feasible way to pack up a family and go somewhere on a limited budget, but we had a definite preference for stopping along the way and seeing the sights, and being open to detours of the moment.  Road trips were just in the family blood.  After all, look what came out of the first one!

Comments

  1. Don MeyerMarch 16, 2012 at 8:54 AM

    And look what came of it -- you, Alison, her kids, and now there's (not so) little Parker.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlisonHMarch 16, 2012 at 2:43 PM

    And our other four brothers and sisters and theirs...

    Dad was also visiting museums on the more major trips, representing French artists, but in the process he turned it into teaching all of us what our country was really like.

    Do you remember the bald eagle we spotted in the Sierras? Mom and Dad pointed it out in a tall pine, not sure we would ever see one again before they went extinct, as they nearly did.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marian S.March 16, 2012 at 3:52 PM

    The first big trip, the summer before we moved into the house in Bethesda, was to come here to the Seattle World's Fair. I do remember the bald eagle, but not when it was. The other huge trip with the camping trailer was when I was in high school.

    Dad's idea of playing tourist was to find the museums and historical sites. We were exposed to a great deal of knowledge and culture. Then there were the artists who visited us--going to the museums in Washington, D.C. with Nat Leeb. Having his wife and child and nanny come with him when Bryan [our youngest brother] was three, the same age as his daughter Dominique. The nanny's family had been wealthy Jews in Egypt and fled to France when Nasser took over. Art, music, history, and government were our dominant exposures--pretty amazing upbringing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Marian S.March 18, 2012 at 12:57 PM

    Duh--and literature. That one is so much a given, I didn't consciously think of it. Art, music, literature, history and government--and the gospel.

    ReplyDelete

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