Last summer of the 1960s

 

                                                          I loved this house in Billings.

In the mid-1960s, our summer vacations to Montana changed.  The Feeleys left the “old homestead”.  My Aunt Marcella was a nurse, and for many years had commuted to the small town of Forsyth to work, while and taking care of 7 children and doing all of the chores on the farm that fell to her lot.  She got a job at the Deaconess Hospital in Billings, and Uncle George was hired at the County Courthouse.  We were there the summer they moved, and I thought it was exciting (I guess the nostalgia of leaving the home place didn’t hit me very hard.)  They rented what seemed to me to be a mansion on North 32^nd Street in Billings:  I called it a 3-story house although one of those was the basement, and I guess people didn’t count it that way.  It was a dignified older home, full of the 1930s touches like arched doorways and high ceilings.  The upper floor had three bedrooms and a bath, all explosively hot in the summer but we slept through it anyway.  The basement was nice and cool, but the one bedroom down there was claimed by the oldest child still at home, John. 

Mary and I set about exploring Billings, or the parts of it that we could reach by walking.  There was a lovely place called Pioneer Park just a few blocks away.  It was immense, hilly, green, and like being in a forest to me.  A downtown district was within walking distance the other direction, and we wandered in and out of the stores.

In 1969, my dad had 2 weeks off from his job as a probation officer at the so-called “honor camps”.  These were minimum-security rural locations where non-violent offenders could serve their jail time.  He worked alternating one week on duty (a kind of a 24-hour work/be on call) and one week off, at home.  When he got to the 2-week-vacation mark, that meant that he had 4 weeks off that summer.  Mom and Dad decided to go to the East Coast.  At almost 14, I was not thrilled with the idea.  I floated the idea of staying home (didn’t fly) and taking a friend (they thought it would be okay for the trip east, but they were coming back by way of Montana, so worried about what to do with an extra kid then).  Someone suggested asking my cousin Mary, if she could find a way down to San Diego, then when we got to Montana she would be home.  That seemed like a fine idea to all concerned.  Mary was thrilled, as she had never been to our house aside from one visit when she was 2 years old that she had no memory of.  She was also more excited to see the East Coast than I was (I had traveled with my parents before and had some idea what to expect).

My parents were not sightseers.  If we headed for somewhere, the idea was to get there as quickly as possible.  We would leave each morning before sunup and drive at least 10 to 12 hours a day.  They looked at a map of the U.S. and picked out places where they knew people (distant relatives my dad called “shirttail relations”, former Marine Corps friends, former neighbors, etc.).  Then they planned the trip around going from one person like this to another.  “I want to see PEOPLE!!” my mother exclaimed proudly as we watched the road signs flash by us for the Grand Canyon, the Carlsbad Caverns, Lakeshore in Chicago…and on and on. 

Mary and I vacationed in motel pools.  At places like Gallup, New Mexico, or Chandler, Arizona, we would pull up to a motel with highway access.  Dad always checked out “how to get back on the highway” and “where to gas up.”  The motels were pretty interchangeable:  rows of rooms opening into a gravel lot, “office” on one end for check-in, an ice machine with the inevitable stern notice “Room use only do not fill ice chests!”.  We always looked for a pool, generally a ramshackle affair with a chain-link fence around it, and a dusty, rusty lawn chair or two.  We changed clothes upon hitting the room and made a beeline for the pool, as my mom inevitably said “How can you have any energy left after the long day we had?  Aren’t you exhausted?”  It never occurred to her that a quick swim in cold water was actually quite invigorating. 

My parents were always, shall we say, careful with money.  It just seemed normal to me then, but now I think their ways were a combination of living through a time when they really had no money, habits of a lifetime, and a reluctance to “waste”.  For this trip (and others like it), my mother packed a hot plate and cans of soup.  At night in the hotel room, we would share a can of chicken noodle soup and call it dinner.  My dad disappeared with the car one night several days into this trip, and was the hero when he came back with a fresh hot pizza.  I imagine it was from whatever fast-food place was available on the main drag of the town, but we were thrilled. 

It was odd, even as cross-country car trips go, and I was glad to have Mary with me.  We visited a lot of old friends and family from my parents’ Marine Corps days, and it would have been awfully boring without a companion.  We sat down to many a lunch or dinner in various states but they all seemed to serve iced tea with meals.  I don’t like iced tea, didn’t then, don’t now.  Mary would drink her glass, and we would furtively switch glasses.  I was of an age where it would have been unthinkably embarrassing to ask for water instead. 

One of these old friends lived in their retirement community at “The Lakes of the Ozarks”, Missouri.  We had some fun there (and it was a nice respite from 12-hour days on the road).  We swam in the lake and went out on the little boat these people kept at their dock. 

When we reached the East Coast, the first stop was my mother’s brother’s house in the small town of Kinston, North Carolina.  Mary and I walked around the town and downtown area (braving the summer heat and humidity).  My aunt served us grits for breakfast and said she was “right proud of you Yankees” for eating them!  She also made waffles, and we were both not happy with what we considered a barely cooked, beige specimen.  So we offered to cook our own (pretending to be helpful, actually being afraid to request crispy waffles).  When we took out a crisp, golden brown waffle she said “Oh, you burned it!”  “Oh, that’s okay” we said “we’ll eat it anyway.” 

Next stop was Washington, D.C.  Neither Mary nor I had ever been there before, and were looking forward to doing some sightseeing.  Of course, we were there to visit people:  we scoured the outlying neighborhood of Oxen Hill, Maryland until we found the a family who were my parents’ next door neighbors when they lived there.  They had a son, a bit younger than us, who we considered a brat and tried to avoid.  We did get to go see the White House one day, and even take a brief tour.  My dad got either food poisoning or an ulcer flare-up, and was very sick and unable to drive us around.  The only other sightseeing we were able to do was an afternoon spent at Mount Vernon (which was lost on me as I didn’t really get the significance of it or why I should be impressed.)

After a few more long days on the road, we stopped at Mary’s oldest sister’s house in Minneapolis, then on to Billings.  Throughout the 4-week trip, I was writing long letters to my friends in San Diego and they were doing the same.  One of them bought a spiral notebook, wrote every day and mailed it to me at my cousin’s when we arrived in Billings.  The big news of that summer?  Plot twists and updates on “Dark Shadows”, the gothic soap opera that fascinated us.