This month, text books will be put away for the summer, but that shouldn’t mean an end to reading.
In fact, summer is the best time of the year for young people to read, mainly because they get to choose the books for themselves.
I was an “early reader” and have had a lifelong fascination with books. As a child, each summer I eagerly anticipated the arrival of our local library’s “Bookmobile” as it made its regular rounds through the city’s neighborhoods.
I don’t really know how I could even estimate how many books I’ve read over the past 50-plus years, and while I have my favorite authors and genres, the most magical aspect of reading is that a new surprise always waits right around the corner. Your “favorite” author or book may be one you haven’t read yet.
Of all the books I have read, one of the most magical carries no title and no author’s name. I found it in a Tempe, Arizona, thrift shop in March 2009.
For the purchase price of 90 cents (after a 10-percent employee discount), I was treated not only to the story of an extraordinary journey around North America taken 86 years ago this summer, but a tantalizing mystery that continues to fire my curiosity and keeps the old book very much alive in my imagination. That’s a feat difficult for even the great masters of literature, let alone a doctor’s wife from Wilmington, Delaware.
“Somebody wrote this book!”
The story of this remarkable book starts with another story — how it was that I happened to come across it.
In 2009, I was working at a Tempe thrift store. Once a week, I and another employee, a young man named Tony, were given the task of going through the books that had been donated to the store and pricing them for resale. The prices were not based on literary value, but on the condition of the book. Typically a book would be priced anywhere from 99 cents to $3 or $4.
One day as we were sorting through the new arrivals, Tony interrupted the silence.
“I don’t know what do to with this one,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, the thing is, somebody wrote this book,” he said.
That seemed odd, I thought, and noted sarcastically that that’s how all books are made, after all.
“No,” he said. “I mean somebody wrote it, like in handwriting.”
“Let me see it,” I said.
It was immediately obvious what the book was — someone’s journal.
The first page was a blank page, save for a simple description, “Route of Our Tour” in print, under which the journal’s author — which I later came to believe was someone named Sarah — had handwritten “Summer 1930.”
The writer’s traveling party included, as best as can be determined, her husband — identified only as “the doctor” — and a young woman named Margaret, who I assumed to be their daughter and probably in her late teens or early 20s.
Because the book was never intended to be anything other than a personal record of the trip, there was no need to fully identify anyone in the traveling party, of course.
The black-and-white photos they had taken during their trip and carefully pasted into the journal provided clues about who they were through the captions written under the photos — “Margaret at the Ambassador Hotel,” or “The Doctor feeds a squirrel,” or “Sarah enjoys the scenery at Lake Louise.”
So, while the identities of the main characters in the book were understandably vague, the details of their trip were detailed through the eyes of Sarah and were enchanting, not only because of the places they visited on their grand tour, but through the perspective of an earlier era.
Pages 2 and 3 of her journal were devoted to a map of the U.S., with the route of the trip marked in red pencil — from New York through Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul up to the Canadian Rockies, Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, then aboard the ocean liner SS Pennsylvania, from Los Angeles through the Panama Canal and on to Cuba, where the narrative ends with no description of the return to New York other than to note their arrival and that the trip from Los Angeles to New York had covered 5,178 miles.
It was near the end of the journal, in an entry dated Wednesday, Sept. 17, that Sarah notes this account of their arrival in Havana harbor:
“Many native boys are in the water, swimming around, begging for money,” she wrote. “They remain floating around all the time, diving for the money thrown to them in the water and (they) come up showing you they have it, for they have put it in their mouths.”
The writer gives no indication as to whether she is amazed or appalled by the scene.
The final entry, dated Sept. 22, touches briefly on their arrival back in New York: “We went ashore about 10 a.m. and were soon finished with the customs men: A taxi to the railroad station and home. We left in the heat and returned to heat! And thus ended our marvelous trip by rail, automobile, boat and train. Thoroughly enjoyed by all.”
The accidental “mystery novel”
As a travel journal, it is a fascinating and unique book. After all, while a modern traveler could take the same route as they did and see many of the same ageless sights, he could never hope to experience the journey as they did. It is likely that every aspect of their journey is altered, in ways perhaps both big and small, by so great a passage of time.
It is that aspect that makes it a captivating read.
Yet, for me, the book’s greatest success is that it reads like a wonderful mystery novel, an unintended mystery, certainly, but no less tantalizing.
These were real people, taking a real journey to real places in a real point in time. And yet, they are shrouded in mystery.
There are wonderful clues interspersed throughout the journal, an occasional hint here and there that tells you something about the travelers and their lives.
The best clue came not from the book itself, but from an old postcard that had been tucked between the pages. It was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Chas. M. Hanby” and sent to an address in Wilmington, Delaware, which is consistent with the author’s journal. (“We left Wilmington, Delaware, Thursday noon, Aug. 7, 1930 on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad,” the journal’s first entry notes.)
Another clue is found in an entry about their stay in Southern California and suggest the couple visited an adult son named Charles (Charles Jr.?) in Pasadena. “We were all delighted to see him as it had been over 3 years since he left us,” the journal notes on Aug. 26.
While we don’t know much about who they are, we know a few other things about them.
They were obviously “people of means.” A 46-day vacation isn’t cheap to begin with. But our travelers stayed at the finest hotels and resorts along the way — the Sherman House in Chicago, Hotel Lowery in St. Paul, the Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise, both in Alberta, Canada, The Empress Hotel in Vancouver, the Multnomah Hotel in Portland, the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California and the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (which had hosted the second Academy Awards just four months prior to our writer’s arrival and would be the site of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy 38 years later).
The Ambassador, Sherman House, Del Monte and Multnomah has long since closed, but at the time they were the favored accommodations of the rich and famous.
At the time of our narrator’s travel, the SS Pennsylvania, which bore them from Los Angeles to New York via the Panama Canal and Cuba, was just a year old and the pride of the Panama Pacific Line. The great ocean liner was scrapped in 1964.
What happens next?
There are just enough clues provided in the journal to make us want to know more. Every detail provided prompts a dozen more questions. That’s the mark of good writing, of course.
And there is also another deeper mystery: What became of our travelers after their journey’s end?
When Sarah, the Doctor and Margaret left on their grand vacation, just 10 months had passed since the collapse of the stock market. Even as they journeyed across the country, the ominous shadow of The Great Depression crept across the nation.
The coming years would be a grim, desperate story of survival, a crisis that would crush not only the poor and middle class, but many of the wealthy, too.
Would our travelers be among those whose wealth and comfort were swept away by what was to come? Would this be their last grand vacation? Would the hard times to come find them more in the condition of the Cuban children who dived for coins than the wealthy travelers who tossed their pocket change into the sea?
Following the story
Someday, I would like to travel to Wilmington and California and wherever else the trail might lead to learn what I can about the travelers, who they were and what became of them. There are so many questions, as yet unanswered, including how a journal written by someone from Delaware in 1930 wound up in a Tempe, Arizona, thrift store in 2009. Then, after I got to know them, I’d like to recreate that summer journey of eight-plus decades ago.
Of course, that would require a lot of free time (which I have little of) and money (which I have even less of), so it may remain as it is — an unsolved mystery and an incomplete story.
But isn’t that also the beauty of books?
They take us places we may never go, can never go, and our world becomes much larger just the same.
I hope kids read a lot this summer. There’s just no telling where it may take them.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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