TRUE LOVE
Move west ends in marriage
The Wilson family lived in Nebraska, but decided to move to where jobs were more plentiful. In 1942, my grandparents and their seven children, including my mother, Irene, headed out West to Oregon.
For the trip, my grandpa bought a 1929 Model A pickup that he outfitted with a wooden canopy to cover the truck bed. The only problem was that my grandparents didn’t know how to drive! Irene, their oldest, had a boyfriend, Perle, who suggested that he could be the family’s driver on their sevenday journey. Perle had a plan to ask Irene to marry him when they arrived in Oregon.
The family took him up on his offer, so off they went, with three passengers in the front seat and seven in the truck bed under the canopy. A wooden box of chickens was tied to one of the fenders and a box full of the children’s pet pigeons was tied to the other.
After several flat tires, and a week that was otherwise fairly uneventful, the family got over the mountains and into