Levi's Dream: A 1930 trip to the national parks in a Model A Ford . . . with seven children

Levi’s Dream

This book is dedicated to Grandma and Grandpa

and also to Uncle Jim, Marilee’s husband, who passed away in 2021 while we were writing this book.

Jim and Marilee

Grandma and Grandpa

Contents

1930 Map of US Showing Trip Route

Introduction

Chapter One

1929: Levi’s Dream

Chapter Two

1909–1920: The Golden Age of Agriculture andthe Emerging Age of Auto and AirTransportation

Chapter Three

The 1920s on an Iowa Farm

Chapter Four

1926: You’re Ahead in a Ford All the Way. From the Model T to the Model A

Chapter Five

1930: The Trip Begins: Crystal Lake to Cody, Wyoming

Chapter Six

1930: Yellowstone National Park

Chapter Seven

1930: On the Way to the West Coast

Chapter Eight

1930–31: Living the Life in Compton, California

Chapter Nine

1931: Home to Iowa

Chapter Ten

The Tumultuous Thirties

Epilogue

The Winds of War

National Parks, National Forests, and Cities Visited on the Trip

Publications That Helped Us with Research

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

1930 Map of US Showing Trip Route

Introduction

The era between World War I and World War II was one of the most impactful times in our country’s history. Thousands of books have been written about this era, which encompassed both World Wars, the 1918 Pandemic, the coming of age of the motor car and the airplane, and the commercialization of our greatest inventions including electricity, indoor plumbing, telephones and the telegraph, and manufacturing mass production. The 40-hour work week and the popularization of vacation time made life a little easier, but the era also held massive labor strikes, and the beginnings of the women’s rights movement, which brought women the right to vote in 1920.

The Roaring Twenties brought us the beginnings of mass consumerism, credit, and the dramatic rise of income inequality and wealth concentration in the top 1 percent. The era continued with Prohibition, gangsters, robber barons, our worst farm crisis, the Crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the loss of half the nation’s banks and farms. The structure of our country changed dramatically with the massive exodus from farming to urban manufacturing, the rise of modern management, the good roads movement, and the opening of the national parks to the average American.

So many events that turned the zeitgeist of our country and the world upside down. However, most of the storytelling of that time is narrowly focused on just one or two of these events, centering around a male hero or anti-hero and typically excluding the experiences of women, minorities, and families. Rarely do we see a story about how all these world-shattering events impacted just one ordinary American family.

When we started writing this book, we thought we would write about the simple story of my grandparent’s 15-month trip across the country in a 1930 Model A Ford with seven of their thirteen kids, visiting relatives and the national parks.

As we proceeded in the narrative of this book, we realized this was not just a simple story. This was a reveal of how all these historic events in this complex era dramatically affected my family. Not just during the two decades of these events, but in the lasting DNA of future generations. Maybe in the same way these historic events have affected your family.

Chapter One

1929: Levi’s Dream

It was the spring of 1929 and my grandpa, Levi Cottington, had a dream. It was not the American dream of most people of that era and this was an era of grand dreams. There were those who dreamed of traveling West and claiming their own land. There were those who dreamed of becoming a star in the enticing land of Hollywood. Some were making millions through illegal hauls of alcohol; some were robbing banks. Whatever was forbidden was immediately demanded. The country was filled with citizens who dreamed of riches from gambling in the ever-rising stock market. Stock prices were driven by a frenzy, which seemed to ignore that prices did not begin to reflect the underlying values of the companies. The Wall Street titans were obsessed with their holding companies and investment trusts . . . clever structures meant to lure the public into investments that would mostly allow the titans to skim off the top and leave the investors holding the bag.

Few people in the go-go years of the 1920s ever understood the real ethos robber barons would never confess: the goal of Wall Street was to facilitate speculation and encourage the public to gamble on the margin. A goal they achieved because, by the end of the decade, over half of the stock was purchased on the margin with borrowed money. How many ways could they package and repackage investments into instruments with dubious long-term value? After the October 1929 crash, a senior partner of Goldman Sachs confessed to President Roosevelt, Over speculation and a reckless disregard of economics was the cause of the crash. There was a group [of people] ruthlessly selling short—you could sell anything and depress the market unduly, and the more you depressed it, the more you created panic. A pattern that would repeat itself in the 2008 financial crisis.

My grandpa Levi was not one of those big dreamers. He was a modest and measured man and like many Iowa farmers, rejected the Wall Street schemes for making money. Grandpa’s dream was to take time off from the grinding work of managing a 360-acre farm in north central Iowa, in order to spend time with his beloved wife and children on a cross-country trip. He wanted to show his family there was more to life and more to this country than their plot of land in Winnebago County, Iowa, which required them to work from dawn to dusk during one of the most crushing farm depressions in the history of this country. He wanted to inspire his family with a trip to the national parks in the West, visit and connect with relatives scattered around the country, and live for a few months in the intriguing land of southern California. He told his neighbors there were other worlds out there and his children must experience those worlds.

He also was greatly intrigued with the new Ford Model A Standard Fordor. Finally, there was an affordable car that could comfortably hold a large family on a trip across America. The roads were getting safer and easier to travel, and the national parks were finally opened to auto traffic and contained some of the grandest scenery in the world.

However, there was a deeper and more poignant reason for this 15,000-mile trip around the country. It had been a tough decade. The Golden Age of Agriculture that had existed at the turn of the century and expanded during World War I, had crumbled and the 1920s turned out to be one of the toughest decades for farmers. While urban America enjoyed the Roaring Twenties, speakeasies, the Jazz Age, and a rising and speculative economy, farmers were literally left in the dust. The pricing of farm commodities had plummeted after the war, and farming expenses had risen.

Grandpa was also still recovering from multiple deaths in his family, including the death of his first wife, Etheldra, who died of a stroke in 1913, leaving him a widower with four small children under the age of seven. Just a few months earlier, his seventeen-year-old nephew, Maynard, son of his brother Jacob, died in a drowning accident. Just three years later, his dear mother, Achsa, died from a paralytic stroke and his sister, Elinor, died after that. In 1918, his second wife, my grandma Gertrude Gienap, had a close brush with death. Recently, his beloved father, Levi Sr., a Civil War hero, had also died of a stroke. Trying to manage all this grief and the pressures of supporting eleven children in the middle of a collapsing farm economy, caused Grandpa to be stunned and shattered when he experienced his own stroke. His doctor wisely advised him that he needed to rest and take care of himself.

Faced with the reality of the capricious nature of life, Grandpa wanted to get healthier, relieve stress, and spend time with his wife, my grandma, and their seven youngest children. The four oldest kids would stay and take care of the farm. Grandpa wanted to do everything he could to live a healthier and longer life. He was a gregarious and thoughtful man who was full of adventure and love for his kids. He confided to Grandma often that his sincerest wish was to always have babies in the house. She took the hint and managed to present him with nine children in less than eighteen years (two of the children were born after the trip). My grandparents were not consumed with grabbing more riches or taking part in the go-go, self-absorbed, and frivolous nature of the Roaring Twenties. Instead, my grandparents, like many hard-working Iowa farmers, strode through life knee-deep in decency.

In spite of the tough farming economy, Grandpa was one of the more successful farmers in the community. He had little debt, came from generations of successful farmers, and was an efficient and effective steward of the land. He was well respected in his community and was asked to participate in a number of organizations, including serving as a delegate to the Farm Bureau national convention. He and Grandma rallied all their organizational and business skills and started planning the trip around the country.

Although Grandpa was very excited about the trip, Grandma was a little more circumspect. She loved the idea of the adventure, seeing the remarkable national parks, spending time with her family, escaping the grinding daily chores of a large farm, and visiting relatives. However, she worried the trip could be dangerous for the children, whose ages would range from one to thirteen when they would start the trip. She had read there were grizzly bears, buffaloes, wolves and other dangerous creatures in the national parks. How does one protect your children in that environment? She felt safe camping near relatives, but were the public camps really safe? Over the last decade, thousands of people crossed the country in their motor cars, but she hadn’t heard of any other couple taking their seven young children with them.

They knew it would take about a year to plan for the trip. The most important task for the next year would be to prepare their twenty-one-year-old son, Lyle, and his wife Gayle, to take over the farm for nearly two years, while they traveled. Lyle and Gayle were married in 1929 and eventually would have four children. Lyle would receive help from his younger brothers, Don, age nineteen and Dwight, age seventeen, but this was a lot of responsibility for people their age. The oldest daughter, Gladys, had married Ole Siekmeier in 1927. They had their own farm just a few miles from Forest City, and eventually had six children.

My grandparents also knew the trip needed to start right after school was out in May 1930. That would give them three months to take the northern route of their trip, through Yellowstone National Park, and allow them time to find a home in Los Angeles to rent for nine months so the older kids could enroll in California schools. Their southern route back would start in June 1931, traveling through the Grand Canyon and other national parks, getting back to Iowa in late August 1931. Just in time for the kids to go back to school in Forest City.

They started their preparations by ordering maps of the United States and sent for a number of travel guides that identified good roads, camp sites, and mileage between towns. They read national magazines about the new motor car traveling mania in the country, studied the Sears catalog for camping equipment, and asked for advice from Iowa neighbors who had traveled to California by train or motor car. They contacted close relatives who lived around the country and included them in their route. The schedule would definitely include a week-long stay with Grandpa’s cousin, Lee Spaulding, in Wenatchee, Washington. The two cousins were life-long friends and had invested together in an apple orchard in Wenatchee. Each year, Cousin Lee would load up railroad cars with the apples he had grown and send them to Grandpa, who sold them to Iowans, who loved the crisp, delicious Washington apples.

My grandparents carefully planned the routes and developed a detailed trip schedule and calculated a tight budget for the trip. They calculated the trip to California and back, plus sight-seeing while living in California for nine months, would total at least 15,000 miles of driving. The Model A gas tank held 11 gallons of gas and they could average about 14 miles per gallon, so they could drive about 154 miles on a tank of gas. Gas was up to 50 cents in the rural areas, but only 9 cents a gallon in Los Angeles, averaging around 20 cents a gallon. If they drove 15,000 miles, they would need about 97 tanks of gas averaging $2.20 a tank for a total of $214 for gas. Some of the road guides indicated they could drive about 300 miles a day if there were good roads. However, many of the roads were rough so it was common to routinely blow out tires and require other repairs. They budgeted about $200 for oil, spark plugs, tires, repairs, and any other surprises.

Camping with relatives would be free, but public camps could cost up to $2 a night. They figured they would stay in public camps about half the time, so they budgeted about $100 for camping. Food and entertainment would run a modest $20 a week for nine people, because they would cook all their meals and would rarely eat in restaurants. For the 15-month trip, those costs would be about $1200. Rent for a house in California would be about $20 a month, so rent would add up to $180 for the nine-month period. If extra money was needed, it could be telegraphed to them through Western Union.

These budgeted costs added up to about $1894, so Grandpa purchased $2,000 worth of American Express traveler’s checks for the trip. In 1930, American Express advertised:

The cheques were perfectly safe, worry-proof travel funds. Millions of travelers in the past 39 years carried $2 billion in American Express traveler’s checks. The new small blue cheques fit cozily into a woman’s handbag like a compact, or into a man’s pocket like a card-case. The cheques come in denominations of $10, $20, $50, and $100. They can be purchased for 75 cents for each $100 at 22,000 banks across the country.

The most important purchase for the trip was finding the perfect family motor car. It would have to be roomy enough to accommodate nine people, and sturdy enough to carry a camping tent, camp beds, clothes, utensils, and tools. The next step was searching for a tent that would attach to the car so they could camp out at relatives’ homes as well as the ubiquitous auto camps found in nearly every town and national park around the country.

At night, after the kids were in bed, my