Early in the spring of 1958, before school was out, Dad came down to Merced and picked us up in his green and white 1956 Buick Special and headed east to Illinois to visit his parents. Mom had never driven an automatic transmission before, so Dad showed Mom how to shift into Drive with her foot on the brake, then give it the gas and hang on. The DynaFlow transmission had a unique torque converter with a variable vane stator, which prevented any jerk when shifting. It was hard to feel any shift at all, in fact. The motor just roared at one speed and the car went faster and faster.
Two other unique features on Buicks of that era were the starter switch on the gas pedal and the speedometer display. The starter switch was actually on the carburetor, built into the throttle body. To start the engine, you turned the ignition key and just stepped on the gas pedal. When the engine started, manifold vacuum would disconnect the starter switch so the starter could not function while the engine was running.
The speedometer did not have a pointer hand like most other speedometers. It looked like a red line under the numbers which moved to the right as speed increased. I saw one disassembled years later, and found it was actually a drum behind a horizontal slot. On the drum was painted a red helix on a black background. As the drum was turned by the same mechanism that rotated the needle on other speedometers, the red portion rotated upward and seemed to move across the dial. It gave the car a more solid, substantial feeling than those puny little needles!
John remembers stopping at a restaurant in Livingston, California, called “The Palms” where we all had breakfast. He swears he remembers having pancakes that morning 49 years ago. His memory will be a great help in telling these stories, because it’s so much better than mine!
There was another brief stop in Reno where we kids got to watch Mom and Dad get married again, (that seemed a little surreal) and then we were on the road again. Nevada had no speed limit between towns then, so Dad was over 100 mph everywhere he could across the state. Mom cringed, and I'm sure now she had some regrets already, but we kids loved it! There is something in the Rogers' genes that imparts a need for speed.
As we left Nevada and entered Utah, the speed limit dropped to 70 mph, but the road actually got much straighter as we went out onto the salt flats. Dad took it right up to 120 mph, burying the red spear point that Buicks used for a speedometer into the right of the display. After many miles of this, suddenly Dad said, "Hang on, I've got to slow down fast." He had seen a police cruiser on the other side of the divided highway, and he was crossing the median to follow us. It's still hard to believe, but Dad dropped the shift lever into low range, and the car jerked hard and slowed down rapidly to 70, whereupon Dad put it back into drive, without once turning on a brake light to give him away. The policeman caught up quickly, of course, and followed us for several miles before deciding to give up and go back to the other lanes. They just don't make transmissions like that old Dynaflow anymore.
Evening came as we entered Salt Lake City, where we stopped to eat, and Dad toured us through downtown, showing us the statue to the seagulls, and told us the story of how the Mormon pioneers had a wagon team turn a circle, and then they made all the streets as wide as that circle, which is why the streets there are so wide. None of us wondered at the time how he had come to know so much about Mormons.
It was night as we left Salt Lake City, headed east on Highway 40. All three of us brothers went to sleep in the back, kneeling on the floor with our heads on the rear seat, facing backwards. Sometime in the middle of the night there was a heavy thud and shudder, and we woke up as Dad was sliding to a stop. Something smelled awful, and steam swirled around the car. As Dad went by a flock of sheep, the last one had suddenly jumped in front of the car, and we hit it square in the middle of the grill. The die cast metal grill had shattered and punched myriad holes in the radiator, and besides that the sheep was still under the car, stuck on the exhaust pipe and muffler. Dad backed off of the sheep, and then pulled forward to the side of the road. There was a small stream down an embankment off the road, so after plugging the holes in the radiator with little pieces of cloth, he refilled the radiator with a discarded beer can he found beside the road. He left the radiator cap loose on the first notch, and we slowly started east again. This happened between Vernal, Utah, and the Colorado border. I remember stopping several more times that night for Dad to refill the radiator before we came into Craig, Colorado, at dawn.
Dad stopped at the first service station he came to, and they sold him two cans of Bar's Stopleak, and let him use the water hose to try to wash some of the remains of the sheep from off the bottom of the car. We all had been retching and gagging for hours. Dad ran the engine until it was hot, then poured in the stop leak. After a minute, he pulled out the rags, and we watched the little streams of water choke off and dry up one by one. It was magic! After filling up with gas, Dad went to the local highway patrol office to see if he could get compensation for the damage to the car. They just chuckled, and informed him it was open range, and if the rancher found out who hit the sheep, he would want his livestock replaced. Since it was in another state, they encouraged him to keep on driving east, so that's what we did.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the trip through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. It was anticlimactic, to say the least, and the only thing that sticks with me was listening to the Everly Brothers hit, “Dream, Dream, Dream” and another song by Perry Como, “Kewpie Doll” on the radio. The Bar's Stopleak did its job all the way to Illinois, and back to Oregon again, where Dad replaced the radiator and grille.
We did not go directly to Chillicothe, where our grandparents lived, when we arrived in Illinois. The Seventh-day Adventist church in Peoria was arranging a surprise program for our Grandmother Rogers, modeled on the popular television program “This Is Your Life.” She had nine children, who as soon as they were able, had moved away to other places. The church had convinced most if not all of them to return to Peoria on a Friday evening for the program to honor their mother.
She was seated on the stage while the pastor began to tell the story of her life, and as he came to stories of her children, they would come out on stage with their families to honor and hug her. She was more and more amazed, as sons and daughters she hadn’t seen in years came onto the stage.
I don’t remember whether our family was near the first or last, but when the pastor announced Vernon and his family were here to greet her, tears of joy overwhelmed the surprise on her face, and she hugged and cried with all of us. I’m sure she had thought she would never see us together again as a family. She was almost right.
The next day, after the Sabbath church services, our Dad was baptized into the Adventist church again, and we all hoped that this was going to be the start of a new life with a father again.
After a few days of visiting with family, including a potluck dinner at a large park on the Illinois river in downtown Peoria, we loaded up and headed west again. We went up through Wyoming and Idaho following highway 30 to La Grande, Oregon.
Since we had not finished the school year yet, Mom and us kids went back to Merced to finish the school year. Dad lent us his second car, which was a 1949 Nash Airflyte.
We all thought it was pretty ugly as cars go, but years later we found that it had been designed using a wind tunnel and was actually way before its time in several areas. The Nash was the first to use unit body construction, with no separate frame underneath. That made the car lighter and yet more rigid on rough roads. It also had an ignition switch on the steering column, something that didn’t happen on other makes until decades later.
The flathead six cylinder engine was unique, using a “sealed in” manifold for simplicity and reliability. The carburetor was bolted directly to the cylinder head, which had the appropriate passages to carry the fuel mixture to the intake valves.
This car also had a Borg-Warner overdrive unit, which helped get great gas mileage. There was a collar type switch on the column shift lever to switch in and out of overdrive. When you were in high gear, you just twisted the switch on, then let up on the gas. There was a slight clunk as the gears changed, then you were in a higher gear. It was possible to downshift by double clutching, but it took skill and timing so usually we just shifted out of overdrive after stopping. While the unit was in overdrive, the car freewheeled if you backed off, so when encountering downgrades in the mountains, it was a good idea to pull the mechanical handle under the dash to lock out the overdrive, otherwise you risked burning up the brakes.
The most famous item on the Nash was the reclining seats. Many fathers would not let their daughters go out on a date with a boy driving a Nash. The front seatbacks reclined all the way down flush with the back seats, making a bed for two people. I’ve heard of girls becoming pregnant in Volkswagens, but it would be a lot more comfortable in a Nash!
After school was over that year, we all went back to Oregon in the Nash and moved into the housing Dad had for us.
Dad had a mechanic job at M. J. Goss Motors in La Grande, and we all lived in an 8’ X 35’ Nashua trailer house in a small trailer park just south of town. This wasn’t large enough to be called a mobile home by any stretch of imagination. When they talk of “shotgun houses” in New Orleans, I think of that trailer.
In the front was a small living room, which had a table in one end to become the dining room, which was next to the sink and stove, which qualified that end as the kitchen. Through a narrow door was the first bedroom, with cabinets on one side of the passage for closets, and bunk beds on the other side for us kids. I had the top bunk, and I think Bill and John shared the bottom.
Through another small door and you were in the bathroom next to the toilet and sink. Behind them was a small bathtub—so small you had to sit with knees high and feet pulled in. Luckily none of us were overweight.
The last room through the next door was the second bedroom for Mom and Dad. The double bed pretty much filled the room, except for a narrow aisle down one side to get back to the closet. From the door, climbing across the bed was required to get to that aisle.
There were no playgrounds or parks nearby, so we got into trouble pretty regularly. We were chastised for sneaking across a wooden fence and eating berries in a little garden next door.
A block away was a drive in movie, and Bill and I noticed that there were wooden ladders wired to the structure all the way to the top. So every day we would climb a ladder and look around. But the ladders were old and rickety, and the baling wire had loosened through the years, so we would chicken out and come down every day without getting to the top.
It’s funny how familiarity breeds contempt—each day we climbed a little higher, because—well, we climbed that high yesterday and the ladder held OK, didn’t it? I think it took about a week or so until Bill and I both risked that last, highest ladder, and crawled out on top of the movie screen. I remember it being maybe two feet wide and forty feet long, covered in tarpaper and coarse sand composite roofing. I don’t remember either of us standing up, but maybe I have blanked it out. I know we had to talk ourselves into crawling over to the ladder and beginning the long, shaky descent back to earth.
At one end of the trailer park was what seemed to be a junk storage area, with old logs and boards and car parts piled around. We found an old Ford front axle, with the hubs and wheels still attached (no tires) and Bill and I got the bright idea of stacking two long straight pine logs on top of another log so the two logs had a good slope. By spacing the logs the same distance as the wheels, we could sit on the axle and roll down to the bottom, where the axle would stop when it hit the dirt. Of course, you had to ride with your feet held straight out in front so they wouldn’t touch the ground. We gave all the neighborhood kids rides, including the girls, and great fun was had by all.
How we managed this without anybody breaking both legs I’ll never know. It’s just one more thing that gives me shudders thinking about now.
A few days after we had moved into La Grande, Oregon, Dad took the whole family out to eat at a local restaurant. Our waitress was obviously an old friend of his, and he introduced Ethel to all of us. We all knew he had lived there for a year or two, and nobody was surprised that he would know her.
He worked at M. J. Goss, a Chevrolet/Oldsmobile dealer in town as a mechanic. He told us about the attic above the parts room, that he said was filled with old Studebaker parts left over from when the place had been a Studebaker dealership. I guess he just moved the old parts upstairs when he stocked the new GM parts below. I have often wondered what ever happened to those old parts. With the restoration revival going on presently, those parts would be worth millions now.
In a few weeks—less than two months—Dad said we were all going to move back to Merced, California. We were all getting a little homesick, I think, and we kids anyway, welcomed the announcement. He explained that Mom would be pulling the trailer down behind the Buick, and he would follow us down as soon as he could wrap things up in Oregon. He spent the next week fitting a two wheel dolly to the front of the trailer to help carry the load. The Buick had soft coil springs on the back axle, so it couldn’t have carried the weight without crunching the springs down to the rubber stops.
He also fitted a trailer hitch to the car, and installed a brake controller under the dashboard on the right of the steering column. The trailer brakes were electro-magnetic and seemed to be either off or full on with trailer tires squalling and smoking.
On the appointed day, we all piled in the Buick and headed north on old Hwy 30. The route chosen was to go north to Pendleton, bend west to Biggs Junction, then south on Hwy 97 to Weed, California, where we would follow Hwy 99 south to Merced. Any other route would involve a narrow, winding mountain pass across the high Sierras.
Dad showed Mom how to drive the rig, and he drove us through the Blue Mountains to the top of Cabbage Hill. There was a rest stop up there, and we stopped and ate lunch, I think, and then Dad left us there to hitchhike back to La Grand. The old highway switchbacked down from the crest of the Blue Mountains, the foothills looking like leaves of a cabbage. I remember the stories of log trucks losing their brakes and crashing on the hill on a regular basis.
There has been speculation that he hoped Mom would just crash and kill all of us before we reached the bottom, but that may be some longstanding anger issues coming out. I don't remember.
I always knew Mom was tough when she needed to be, but looking back on it now, it still amazes me just how she was able to do it. I know she knew Dad better than us kids did, and suspected things that never occurred to us at the time. I wonder now how much pure rage had to do with it.
She actually did a fair job hauling that trailer down the road. She made the turn at Biggs Jct. alright, and had very little trouble until we came to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Somewhere in the middle of town she lost track of the truck route, and we found ourselves in the middle of old downtown, with cars parked on both sides, and two narrow lanes in the middle. Drivers around us were honking their horns and hollering at her, but eventually she got out of downtown and found a place to pull over and stop. I don’t remember now if she asked for directions, or figured it out on the map, but before too long we were on the highway south again.
In the same situation, I would probably have given some of those other drivers a one finger wave, but our mother would not have done so under threat of firing squad.
As she neared Sacramento, Mom decided she didn’t want anymore downtown city driving, so she consulted the map and found a route around the city on the west side, through Dixon and Rio Vista, joining back up to Hwy 99 at Lodi, California.
We were rolling along pretty good south of Dixon, even though the roads were very narrow, when a loud noise and a lot of jerking let us know we had trouble. Both of the small wheels on the trailer dolly had blown out, and we were miles from any town. Not that it made a lot of difference, because Mom was nearly out of money, too.
We sat there for a long time, with Mom crying some, and praying some, partially blocking one lane. Eventually a local man, a farmer, I think, stopped and offered to help when he saw the situation. My brother Bill said he heard him mutter something about any man oughtta be shot who’d send a woman and her kids out alone on the road with a rig like that.
This was well before woman’s liberation, but even now I tend to agree with him.
The two tires and tubes were 8” or 10” size, expensive and hard to find, and it took most of a day to get them and put them back on the dolly. I am sure the Good Samaritan refused money for the tires and work, because Mom still had enough money for gas to Merced.
The only other trouble was when we came to the bridge crossing the Sacramento River—a narrow steel girder bridge that had two of the smallest lanes and looked a mile long. Mom stopped at the north end, and I think she bowed her head and prayed as we waited for oncoming traffic to clear the bridge. When she thought it was hers, she headed out onto the bridge straddling the center line. Before we reached the other side, some guy in a pickup entered the other end. I think Mom said another prayer, which would have been close to a swear word except she sincerely meant it when she said, “Oh, Daddy!” She squeezed as far to the right as she dared, and I’m sure she closed her eyes and waited for the crash, but somehow the pickup missed us and we missed hitting the side of the bridge.
I believe it was the next day when we pulled into the driveway of Aunt Ora’s house at 1430 E. Santa Fe Dr. It was early in the dark of the morning, so Mom parked outside near the street and we all went back to the trailer and went to sleep until dawn. We were awakened by our cousins knocking on the door at sunrise. After a happy reunion with our Aunt Ora and cousins Jim and Glenn, I backed the trailer into the driveway because Mom did not know how to back a trailer, and I had some experience from backing at the Appling’s farm with their Allis-Chalmers tractor and trailer. With Mom and others all helping direct, we got it parked behind the house with the tongue facing the driveway.
Mom called Vern to let him know we had arrived. John says there was some time lapsed between our arrival and the phone call that ended it all, but I can’t remember that. I have forgotten much of the details of those days, but I seem to remember an icy chill going through me outside the house when I heard Mom scream and wail loudly as Aunt Ora rushed in to console and comfort her. Vern had told her on the phone to keep the Buick and trailer, that he wasn’t coming down ever, and he would be sending divorce papers shortly.
It’s a wonder she didn’t die right there. I know she wanted to.
Several weeks later the divorce papers arrived, and the reason for the divorce was desertion—Mom had deserted Dad! Having no money for lawyers, and never wanting to see him again, she signed the papers and sent them back.
