I recently posted to the Lost Angeles Facebook group a few days' worth of entries from the trip journal typed up by my grandfather after the big road trip from Ashland Pennsylvania to Los Angeles and back in 1951. My grandfather, Alan Coddington, bought a brand new yellow Chevrolet convertible, and my then-18 year old mother ("Jule" in the journal), my grandmother "Tootsie" or "Toots" (a.k.a. Helen), and my great aunt Nantie, all piled in to that car and took from June 9th to July 11th to drive more than 6000 miles round trip. Nantie, who had been a teacher and school administrator for years, kept fairly detailed notes in pencil, an entry for every day of the trip. My grandfather must have had his own memories as well, because when he typed up Nantie's notes after they were back in Pennsylvania, he often added perspectives that Nantie hadn't written down.
The post ended up meaning a lot to people in that FB group, and there were some requests to read the whole thing. This reminded me that I have been meaning to digitize the entire journal, including Nantie's handwritten notes, the expense list, the mileage log, and my grandfather's typed version. It's a big project, so I'm going to approach it in parts. And I am only going to upload my grandfather's typed version for now. The plan is to go back and fill it out with the AAA trip tick maps, Nantie's written notes, and other items and reflections later. I've also been thinking I might try to retrace their trip someday, maybe next summer, at least one way from some Eastern starting point, maybe even Ashland.
Six years after the end of WW2, with my mother having just graduated from Ashland High School. She and my father had broken up when my father left Ashland to go to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and she remained to finish high school. But after a year apart, they reunited and wanted to spend the summer together, so it's interesting to me that the last thing on Earth my mother wanted to do was take this road trip with her parents and aunt. My great aunt and grandfather are so incredibly enthused about every last aspect of this big adventure though. My mother, who died last February, used to describe this trip to me in glowing terms, and I think these visions of the West in particular were a big influence on me. I arrived in Santa Fe NM for college in 1983 and, while I did go back to Pennsylvania and New York to live a few times, I was always drawn back to the West, and have been here straight through now for 33 years.
The goal of this road trip was to visit my uncle Bud at 4807 Slauson Ave in LA, where he had moved. I do not know the back story on his big adventure in LA, nor why he returned to Pennsylvania and lived the rest of his life outside Philadelphia. I moved to LA twice, from 2002-2004 and from 2020-2022, and both times, lived only about 2 miles from where Bud lived in 1951. My oldest brother also moved to Hungtington Beach right after undergrad, but he moved back east after a few years. It seems for our family the West Coast has a kind of siren song but we never stay.
One thing that's jarring and makes me queasy is the casual racism that pops up a few times. For example, in St. Louis: "Beautiful weather, very clean city, but lots of colored people." Or the equally cringe note from Gallup, NM: "Indians in the streets-- ugh!" Pretty grotesque.
My grandfather in a very elegant photo with cigarette, probably from around the time of this trip. He died 9 years after this trip, a year before I was born.
Anyway, here's his typed entries from June 8 to June 27, spanning Ashland to Yosemite.
