Great-grandpa F.A. Traveled West – 52 Ancestors #28 Travel

There are many reasons we travel and our ancestors traveled.  I have traveled for work, for pleasure (vacation) and for other pleasure (genealogy research).  And of course I have moved my residence a number of times over the years, some changes which necessitated moving from one state to another.  Other relatives I have written previous posts about traveled to immigrate to the United States (or the colonies), to move within the country and for work, sometimes for no good reason that I can see, and sometimes for vacation (or combining work with vacation).

In the interviews I’ve written about before, Grandpa Lyle described a trip West his family took when he was turning 9 years old (in the summer of 1905) to visit his father’s brothers and sisters, and then the similar (in some ways) trip his father, my great grandfather F.A. Denman, took in about 1937 or 1938.  Grandpa Lyle said F.A. would have been about 80 but he was off by 10 years and the trip must have taken place before the summer of 1940.

Here’s Lyle talking about it:

“When Father was perhaps 80 years old, it was a matter of 1937 or 1938, which would be 81 or 82 years, he made another trip to the west.  He found his brother John in a nursing home at Lincoln, Nebraska.  His sister Hatty was living in the sod house, as I recall, with her son Clifford, her youngest son, Clifford.  [This was in Kansas, and the younger Denman family had visited both Nebraska and Kansas in 1905.] And then he continued on to the west coast to California where his oldest sister, Lida, and her husband, John Struble, were living in Oakland.  He stayed with them several days, maybe perhaps a week or longer.  I can’t recall.  But one of the things that he did, he would take the ferry across the bay into San Francisco from Oakland on the mainland, and would explore San Francisco — which he did thoroughly I believe.  One of the things that he insisted on and wanted to do — and rather frightened his sister and brother-in-law — he wanted to be on the Golden Gate Bridge when the sun went into the ocean.”

[The Golden Gate Bridge opened in May 1937 so he must have traveled after that date.]  “And he got there and then he was, it was kind of a warm afternoon.  He was carrying his overcoat.  And some of the guards or watchmen there tried to stop him.  They said, “It’s a long ways over that bridge.”  And they had had a number of suicides and wondered.  They kept watch of anybody like that, an old man that, that wanted to walk there.  But he reached the top of the bridge before sunset and he stood and just waited there until — it happened to be a clear day, no fog — and he was able to see the sun sink into the Pacific.  Then he continued — it was long after dark when he got across the bridge to the other side.  And he took a ferry boat from Sausalito.  They had a boat that would take him back to San Francisco, or Oakland.  I don’t know which.  But he, he took — he walked across that bridge and saw the sun go into the ocean and continued on across and rode a boat back to — and he was very late getting home, you know, to Oakland.  And his older sister and John were very worried about him.  They kind of scolded him a little bit.”

“…he had one of the — I think they sold a ticket for ninety or a hundred dollars from coast to coast.  And he left the east — he left Wakeman and went there and then he came back.  He got down to — on that trip, he left there shortly after Christmas and arrived in Los Angeles and attended the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena.  And I think he — I don’t know whether he had tickets to the football game or not.  But anyway, he saw the Rose Bowl Parade on that trip.  And then he headed back.”

“He headed back toward the east by way, on the, it would be the Missouri-Pacific I’m pretty sure, into New Orleans.  And that was a pretty — I don’t know how long that took him.  Must have been 36 hours or 48, whatever it was.  He got back to New Orleans.”

“He made a stop over and saw the Hoover Dam and an airplane there was so much for a trip over there.  Today, I cannot tell you for sure.  But I do know that he did visit the Hoover Dam and had an airplane ride up over the reservoir, the lake there.  [It seems likely that he took a train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and that was how he saw the Dam, called Boulder Dam at that point.  It was just opened to tours in 1937 and while I would have thought he would want to see the dam itself, the memory was of the flight he took.]  And then he continued on to New Orleans.  And at New Orleans he spent several days there visiting different places.  An old battle — where the last battle was fought after the war was over.  And he described the living, the live oak trees which I was not too familiar with.  I said, “Well, aren’t all oak trees live oak?”  And, “Why no,” he said, “these don’t lose any leaves.  They stay year round.”  New leaves come out and push the old ones off sometimes, but there — he explained it to me.  And then from there — I think he headed back from New Orleans to Chicago, and on home.”