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
Oregon. With the brakes on the old Model A overheating and smoking all the way down, the truck brought its load of 10 passengers into the Willamette Valley.
The men quickly found jobs working on the railroad at 45 cents an hour. Perle and Irene were soon married, but within months, Perle got his draft notice from the Army and was sent to a combat zone in the South Pacific, where he was severely injured. He was hospitalized in Australia for several months, then transported stateside.
I was born to Irene and Perle the following year, and my sister Eloyce three years later. Dad’s family, the Coopers, moved West, too, and he and his twin brother, Merle, started a logging company with their brothers. Later, Dad got a job at a local plywood mill, where I worked with him after I graduated from high school until he retired. My parents were married 64 years. Dad said he would have married Mom no matter where she went.
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