On the Trail of an American Dream
Bob Snow and I married in 1945, shortly after we both were discharged from the military in Illinois. He had been an aircraft crew chief during the war and loved it, so he hoped to do the same kind of work in peacetime.
His dream was to apply to the Flying Tigers, the country’s first cargo freight airline, which was in California.
I was in love and would have gone to the moon with him, but California? That was beyond my imagination. It became very real in 1946 when we bought a Kozy Coach house trailer and outfitted it with birch cupboards, sink, water pump, refrigerator and space heater. Loaded, the thing had to weigh 1½ tons.
“Now we can go to California!” Bob exclaimed. So we hitched the coach to our
1940 Plymouth coupe and headed west out of Chicago along Route 66.
Going through Missouri, we passed several handmade signs: See the Cave. These led us to an old farmhouse, where two elderly ladies welcomed us like old friends. They took turns explaining the natural formations in the cave and shooing away the bats, saying, “Don’t scare the nice folks!”
The Oklahoma oil wells were an ugly part of the scenery for me, a farm girl raised in the green rolling hills of southwest Michigan.
Texas and New Mexico rolled by. In each little town we saw hotels, stores and gas stations in unusual styles, including teepees, pueblos and frontierlike storefronts. We’d stop nightly at a gas station, where for $5 or $10, we could plug into the electricity, fix our food, use the bathroom and bathe out of a basin. It was a simple, easy life.
In Flagstaff, Arizona, we left the trailer at a gas station to drive down a narrow, rocky road to the Grand Canyon, which was breathtaking beyond description. We happened to park near a couple from Galesburg, Michigan, and we all hugged as if we knew each other.
Up in the mountains, we passed several big cars on the side of the highway with radiators boiling over. Our coupe was performing beautifully, thanks to Bob, a top-notch mechanic who kept the Plymouth well-tuned. I was proud of him.
The mountain driving involved a lot of maneuvering around tight corners and up and down steep grades, but we finally reached the foothills, where we could see miles of flat road
leading into Bakersfield, California.
As we descended, we continued to gain speed, until I peeked at the dashboard and saw that we were going 82 mph.
I gripped Bob’s arm. “I don’t like to go this fast,” I told him.
“I don’t either,” he said. “But we have no more brakes.” We had to ride it out as best we could.
At the end of our journey we settled in at a Culver City trailer park. Bob worked for the Flying Tigers for several months until the company relocated to Burbank. We couldn’t find a decent trailer park near there, so we moved on. We traveled as far as Oregon in hopes of finding another airline job for Bob before eventually deciding to head back home to Michigan.
After a terrifying haul east through the Rocky Mountains on switchback roads beside 6,000-foot drops, I’d had enough of that
Kozy Coach. We wound up selling it in Reno, Nevada, to a couple that planned to take it to Alaska along the recently built Alcan Highway. I wished them good luck and blew a kiss goodbye to what had been our sweet little home for over a year. We’d seen a lot of the country together.