My cousin Naomi handed me copies of 31 letters during her father’s 100th birthday celebration on June 7. The pages chronicle a three-month trip to the West Coast that our grandparents, Leslie and Esther Everly, took in 1930 with their three children – Dorothy, 13, my mother Evelyn, 11, and Naomi’s father, Aubrey, 8.

The letters were handwritten on the road and mailed to relatives in Iowa. 

I’ve always been curious about that Depression-era trip. What prompted 36-year-old Leslie to shut down his farm and take off for the West Coast with his wife, three children and their dog, Fido, in a Winnebago-style camper that he built on the frame of a flatbed truck?

Did he hope to find work? To join relatives who had already moved to California? Or was it, as my mother remembered, just one big long vacation?

I still don’t know. 

What is clear is that my grandfather suffered pain in his shoulder and hip throughout the trip and wrote that the pain often made him “cranky.” 

The family left their farm near Bondurant on Thursday, Aug. 7, and returned 107 days later on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. 

Their original party included a teacher for the children, but she bailed after two weeks. 

Early letters sound grim with Leslie reporting “Esther had to drive a good deal. My rheumatism is hurting me pretty bad.” In fact, my 5-foot-3-inch grandmother, who was shorter than her 13-year-old daughter, drove the bus-sized motor home much of the time. 

Dirt roads “make a person tired and plenty dirty,” Esther wrote. “We sure have to clean house after we make a drive.”

“This life is all right if you like it,” she continued, “but I can’t say I like it.”  

“Expenses are greater than I thought,” Leslie wrote on Aug. 29. His homemade motor home got 12 miles per gallon. At 25 cents a gallon, fuel would cost about $100 ($1,770 in 2020 dollars) for the 5,000-mile trip.

The family did odd jobs along the way to earn money, including picking apples in Minnesota and Washington, and Leslie hunted and fished for food.

The letters mention a few souvenirs, including a bobcat rug that is still in the family. 

They kept in touch with family by having letters addressed to them in care of “general delivery” at post offices along their route. At one point Leslie asked his parents to not include a return address, because letters with return addresses were returned after 10 days. With no return address, he explained, general delivery mail was held for 30 days. 

In late August, they drove through the Black Hills, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum had begun work on his Mount Rushmore monument in 1927, but there wasn’t much to see yet.

They spent several days in Yellowstone Park and much of September in Washington state, where the children attended school for two days before they moved on, with Leslie writing: “Don’t know just where we will go from here.”

A new road along the Columbia River brought them to Portland, Ore., where they headed south. Their first view of the ocean was in Northern California. 

A ferry carried their mobile home across San Francisco Bay. 

Their ultimate destination was Los Angeles, where most of three weeks was spent sightseeing and visiting relatives in Long Beach. 

The collection of letters ended with a postcard dated Nov. 5. It said, “We are now on Catalina Island going out on the glass bottom boat in a few min. – Leslie.”

One reason the trip remained so vivid for my mother and her siblings was that their father died on Valentine’s Day, 1931, less than three months after they returned. 

A drunken driver ran a stop sign in front of Leslie’s truck, which had been converted to haul cattle. He was transporting two newly purchased cows, which tumbled forward, crushing Leslie against the steering column.  

Naomi’s father, Aubrey Everly, who was with his father the day of the fatal accident, and who preserved the 31 letters all those years, died in July, one month after his 100th birthday.