School was out for the summer and dad drove mom, Georgann and me to Union Station in Los Angeles to take the train to Kansas City. We road one way on Santa Fe's El Capitan and the other on the Super Chief. Perhaps the journey only lasted two days, maybe three total, but it seemed endless to us kids. I remember the train stopped in Arizona at one point and I got off, looking up and down the deserted platform. One night I even went to see the dome liner. We got into Kansas City at night and were picked up by relatives from Topeka. We stayed with them a day or two before driving to White Cloud, the small town on the Missouri River where mom and her four siblings were born and raised in the 1920's and 1930's.
The town was thriving before 1900 down to WWII. Much of the population left during the war for work or for military service. My Aunt Norma Jean became an Army nurse in the last year of the war and met her husband at the VA hospital in Palm Springs. Lloyd Green was from a small town in Oklahoma. After the war, they lived in Texas and Oklahoma, but eventually, like so many others, moved to California. Even before the war, mom moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and then on to California because of health issues. Uncle Robert was in the Army and was stationed in Japan after the war ended as part of the occupation. Even Grandma and Grandpa Breeze lived and worked in Wichita and later California, and so did Aunt Doris and her husband, Hap. Those four did return to White Cloud, as Robert would do a few times before moving back there for good in 1965.
I am surprised at the dearth of photographs from that trip. The top one is in front of Grandma Breeze's restaurant with mom, Georgann and me and Aunt Doris. On this visit we met our cousin Jim.
The bottom photograph is Georgann and me with Great Grandma Nuzum's house in the background. Uncle Robert would eventually buy her house years after she died in 1966.
We saw the school building where mom and her siblings went to school when they lived there. We stayed with Grandma in her place above the restaurant but refused to use the smelly, spider-web-infested outhouse behind, so she provided us with a bed pan instead. White Cloud also did not yet have dial phones. You had to crank them and be connected with the operator, who would then connect you to an outside line or with one of the other residents of the town. Grandma Breeze lived alone since Grandpa died two summers before.
We delighted in the fireflies and the movies shown on the main street of town against a large, white sheet strung up between two poles that propped up the awning in front of the restaurant. On the 4th of July, we were amazed at the actual firecrackers and large fireworks that weren't legal in California but were in Kansas. Grandma drove a two-toned 1954 Mercury.
While I remember the train trip to Kansas City, I don't much recall the trip back or dad picking us up at Union Station.
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