Two great trips Continue reading
My dad very seldom took a day off from work. He saved up his vacation time for big trips that were always in the summer. We took several family vacations while I was in grade school. I think that our first big vacation probably occurred in 1955. I don’t remember my mom being pregnant. So, either I have the year wrong, I was oblivious of her condition, or we left Jamie with a babysitter or grandparents.
Our destination was the Colorado Springs area. Although Colorado is immediately west of Kansas,1 Colorado Springs is over 600 miles from KC. My dad drove our ’54 Ford. Mom was navigator, an easy job in Kansas. The back seat was my domain. Of course we counted cows, right side of the road vs. left side. However, for much of the trip I stood up and practiced clapping as loudly as I could. It must have driven my parents crazy.
I remember that they let me fish at a trout farm. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, which I thought was great fun. We drove up Pike’s Peak. We visited the Garden of the Gods and a place where we had a chuckwagon buffet, which I really enjoyed. We also went to a bar/restaurant owned by a relative of (I think) Grandmom Hazel. His name was Louis Something. He served me a Roy Rogers with a tiny umbrella in it. I thought that it was fantastic.
We also went to a race track. I found it fascinating that people discarded their losing tickets on the ground. I gathered up a bunch of them in hopes of finding a winner. No luck.
Before writing this, it never occurred to me that this trip introduced me to both bars and gambling.
My most vivid memory of the trip was when we went to a huge bingo hall. I called out “bingo’ at the same time as one of the other players. There was some controversy. I don’t remember the details, but they ended up awarding the prize to the other person. I was upset about this. I may have even made a scene.
Somehow I came into possession of a Pinocchio doll that was as large as I was. Maybe it was a prize; maybe my parents bought it for me to shut me up. I don’t think that I liked it. I punched it in the nose quite often during the return trip.
All in all I had a very good time. I have always loved to travel.
Our biggest vacation was, I am pretty sure, in 1959. I would have been nearly eleven, and Jamie three and a half. My dad drove all four of us all the way to New England in our ’57 Ford Fairlane and then down the East Coast to Washington, DC. I sat in the back seat with Jamie. On the way there we took the northern route through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. I kept track of our progress on a map. I don’t remember what Jamie was doing.
The first day was an unqualified disaster for me. My mom had prepared a picnic lunch for us. Our first stop was was at a park with picnic tables in Mexico, MO. After lunch we drove east for an hour or so, at which point I realized that I did not have my billfold. I only had a few dollars, but that was a big loss to me. Each dollar bill could purchase 110 baseball cards, if one bought the packs enclosed in cellophane that held eleven cards and cost a dime,2 as I always did. Besides, I had never left anything of value behind before, and I felt stupid and irresponsible.
I felt even more stupid when we stopped for supper. My dad ordered a steak, and so did I. I was later told that we could not afford the vacation if I ordered a steak every night. I didn’t much care what I ate; my tastes have always been pretty eclectic. I just wanted to know what was expected of me before I made more mistakes.
Most of the rest of the trip was delightful. My dad did almost all of the driving. The Interstate Highway System was only three years old. Therefor, large portions of our drive was on two-lane roads that served as Main Street in town after town. We started looking for motels without “No Vacancy” signs when my dad announced that he was getting tired. Since this was the peak season for automobile travel, the rest of us found this somewhat stressful.
Our first major stop was in Albany, NY, the home of my dad’s army buddy, Jake Jacobson. We spent one or two nights at his house. We got to meet his wife Ruth and his son Paul, who was a year older than I was. Jake took us out to eat at a restaurant that served something that I had never before encountered, antipasto. I remarked that it sounded like Andy Pafko, who played his last season in 1959 for the Milwaukee Braves. Jake liked my little joke, which in turn made me like him. Afterwards he showed some home movies. All that I remember about them was that they showed off Ruth’s legs.
The next day I got to play hardball with Paul and some of his friends on a field with fences and everything. I was very happy that I got a hit or two, and my team won.
We then drove up to Maine and traveled through each of the six New England states before we ended up at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. I think that we stayed overnight in a motel in Maine or New Hampshire. I remember that I slept through the entire state of Rhode Island.
The Jacobsons joined us in New York to watch a the A’s at Yankee Stadium. We sat near the right field line. We had a very good view of the “Pennant Porch”. Joe DeMaestri, of all people,3 hit a home run for the visiting A’s. The four Wavadas were the only people who cheered. It did not feel like it at the time, but this was the best of all the teams in the thirteen-year history of the A’s in KC.
All of us took the elevator to the observation floor of the Empire State Building, and Paul and I climbed the stairs to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. The most memorable event, however, occurred in our car. My dad got confused somewhere in the Bronx and ran a red light. A policeman pulled us over. When he saw on my dad’s driver’s license that we were from Prairie Village, KS, he could hardly contain his mirth. He let us proceed after lecturing my dad on the differences between driving in Gotham and on the prairie. For example, there are fewer buffaloes in NYC.
Our next stop was the Chalfonte Hotel in Atlantic City, which at that time was a thriving tourist town not yet overrun by casinos. We spent our time there on or near the boardwalk, but we did take the opportunity to watch the high-diving horse on the Steel Pier.
Stopping in Atlantic City was a good idea. New York City and Washington, DC, are intense places. I hate to drive in both of them. Atlantic City was fun and relaxing.
Our final major destination was the nation’s capital. We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel. We saw the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the reflecting pool, the congressional buildings, and the White House. The most memorable aspect of this part of the trip was very puzzling. Somehow my mom and dad were unable to find the Smithsonian Institution. The Metro was not opened until seventeen years later. So, we couldn’t just get off at the Smithsonian stop. Still, …
Couldn’t find them? The Natural History Museum, which is the one that I really wanted to visit, was only 1.5 miles from our hotel, and we were much closer to our purported objective than that several times. I was very frustrated, and I may have shown it. Jamie tried to console me. To this day I cannot explain this experience (or lack thereof).
Our return trip home was not very eventful. We were all ready for home. My recollection is that because my dad had never been in South Carolina, we selected a route that allowed us to “dip a toe” there. Then we just headed west toward God’s country.
1. Kansas borders four states: Colorado on the west, Nebraska on the north, Missouri on the east, and Oklahoma on the south.
2. Bruce Smith Drugs in Prairie Village provided two options for buying baseball cards. For a nickel you could get five cards and a piece of gum in an opaque paper wrapper. For a dime you could get eleven cards but no gum. However, you could see both the top card and the bottom card. This could help you avoid the disastrous possibility of buying five cards that you already had. Nobody liked the gum anyway.
3. DeMaestri hit only hit six homers in 1959.