In the summer of 1957, my mother, sister Jane, and I travelled by train across the country to visit my mother’s parents and her sister’s family in California for six weeks.
I have vivid memories of that experience, beginning with saying good-bye to my father at the train station in Hartford. I remember him kneeling down, holding me tight by the shoulders and looking at me with tears in his eyes. This frightened me and I cried out, “You’re crying.” He tried to assure me he wasn’t, but I was old enough to know he was, and I cried too.
My mother’s family had moved out west around the time my mother and father married in 1948. Aunt Gladys moved first with her husband Robert, a pediatrician and their daughter, Carol Jane. My grandparents joined them soon after, leaving my mom behind with only her Aunt Edith, who lived in Providence, as nearby family. As I grew older, I became aware that my mother really missed her parents and sister a lot. I have wondered from time to time, if she ever had a thought to remain in California with Jane and me. Six weeks is a long time and I understand my father’s tears at the train station, but was he also frightened, as he hugged me close to him, that he might not see his children for a much longer time than one summer?
I’ll never know whatever feelings my mother might have kept to herself at that time, of course, but the trip to California has left me with many vivid memories. I would sometimes go to the sky view dome car and take in the ever-changing vistas during the three days the train rolled across America. One night, probably the last night before arriving at our destination, I slid open the cover on the small window of the upper berth where I slept in our tiny room. Before me, I saw the desert speeding by. There were sharply delineated mountains on the faraway horizon and as I gazed at this scene, a shooting star flashed across the sky. I remember crossing the Mississippi River and thinking that it was a lake. Another time a kid on a bicycle pedaled alongside my window as the train slowly made its way down the middle of a street in a small town somewhere in the Midwest.
Uncle Bob and Aunt Gladys lived in Santa Monica. They owned an attractive ranch house on a quiet suburban street with towering palm trees on either side of the road. Their backyard had a swimming pool where Jane and I spent many afternoons. There was a little hut next to the pool where we could change into our suits and take a shower. The hut had a strange pungent smell that came from the type of wood it was made from. As I type this now, my mind recalls the scent as vividly as if I were actually there again. The backyard had a spectacular view of the San Gabriel Mountains. In the evening, they looked purple. “Purple mountain majesties” is an accurate description.
My grandparents lived in Pasadena in a small apartment building made all the more nondescript by the towering mountain that overlooked it. I’m not sure how close their home was to their Aunt Gladys and Uncle Bob’s home, but I remember going there more than once. My aunt and uncle took us on a number of day trips during our time there. I remember seeing Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, the Santa Monica pier, Mount Wilson Observatory, and Colorado Boulevard where the Tournament of Roses parade is held on New Year’s Day.
I remember going to see Walt Disney’s Johnny Tremaine, a playground not far from my aunt and uncle’s home, my cousin Carol Jane’s teenage infatuation with Pat Boone and her repeated playing of “Love Letters in the Sand,” a woman in the house next store who would cry every night for her mommy. This sad sound scared me the first time I heard it and I went to my mom and aunt and uncle and told them that the lady next door was in trouble. My aunt and uncle laughed when I said that, so I figured everything was okay when I heard her crying on other nights. It seems strange to me now that they laughed at a neighbor’s pain as they did.
There were lots of tears from all the adults and Carol Jane when we left to return to Connecticut. I became concerned when an older boy, maybe 10 or 11, pointed to a nearby freight car and told me there was a body in it. I recall nothing about the trip back, about seeing my father again, about starting third grade shortly after returning. The last thing I remember from that summer is standing at the station, waiting for the train to bring us back to Connecticut, and looking at that freight car with dread in the pit of my stomach. All these years later, that’s where my memory of the trip to California ends.
David James Madden