An Introduction to the Project

It begins, you see, with a small black ledger found while rummaging through a box of photos at my mom’s condo. The ledger’s inside cover announces, ““Made Expressly for F.W. Woolworth Co.” And beyond that, my grandmother’s looping scrawl. The first page titled “June 15, 1946.”

The ledger is my grandmother’s record of the cross-country road trip she took in 1946. She began in Bridgeport, CT, probably in front of the house my mother owned until just a decade ago, a tall frame home filled with marble-topped tables. She winds back to Bridgeport 23 days later, after driving across Pennsylvania and into the Midwest. After seeing Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone. After experiencing the car’s gear shift going out in the Big Horn Mountains. After having a drink at the Brown Derby in L.A. and eating what I’d guess where her first-ever tamales and enchiladas in Taos. Across Kansas, Missouri, a few days relaxing with her sister in Indianapolis. Back across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, whose tunnels were dug by Cornelius Vanderbilt for a defunct train route.

My grandmother clearly didn’t have posterity on her mind when she scribbled her journal. She offers no motivations for a trip that took her away from her home, husband and two kids for three full weeks. She offers no details of planning or clues to what she might have thought about, talked about, longed for or celebrated in 7,550 miles of driving. She was a nurse, and she was used to getting the facts on paper. She offers distances. Times. Hotel names. Meals of black elk and canned food.

Through the journal, three women creep in. Norma, who took the lead in changing a blown-out tire near the Grand Canyon. Marie, who started a fire that “sure felt good” in their Yellowstone hotel room. And Pauline, who my grandmother kidded about going over snow-covered mountains in the South Dakota distance. “What a surprise – we did!!!!”

So we have four women traveling together across the country just nine months after the war ended. My grandmother, born in 1909, was 37 years old. I am 37 years old.

This is where I enter the story.

This summer, 60 years after my grandmother’s trip, I will trace her journey, leaving Bridgeport on June 15th, returning July 8th, driving the same distances she drove, seeing the same sights she saw, staying when possible in the same hotels she stayed in. It is a different country. It is the same country. We are the same age. We are in different stages of life. Where do we intersect?

The project is an adventure. It is a quest. And it is a book. This blog will track its unfolding.