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My Journey of States-30 Georgia

11/21/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Tayari Jones
Born November 30, 1970
Atlanta, Georgia

T. Jones

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirtieth post of fifty.

Georgia (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994)

The first trip of four that Ken and I made to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we flew into Atlanta, Georgia. The Atlanta airport was touted as being one of the world’s busiest, and I had no argument with anyone about that, as we busted our rears to get to our gate. Our fourth trip we motored from Texas and drove through a bustling Atlanta, a city I would like to see more of. I would like to visit Savanah. I would like to see where author Flannery O’Connor lived. I would like to see free and fair elections in Georgia before my life ends. That's when I may return to Georgia.

Georgia is fourth of the original thirteen colonies and celebrated its bicenquinquagenary in 2013.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi
10-West VA   22. New Mexico
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee
12. Virginia   24. Arizona

NEXT TIME: My Book World, The Real Lolita

My Journey of States-24 Arizona

9/26/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
As gun owners, my husband and I understand that the Second Amendment is most at risk when a criminal or deranged person commits a gun crime. These acts only embolden those who oppose gun ownership. Promoting responsible gun laws protects the Second Amendment and reduces lives lost from guns.
Gabrielle Giffords
Born June 8, 1970 Tucson, Arizona

G. Giffords

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-fourth post of fifty.

ARIZONA (1975, 1993, 2004, 2017)

I first made it to Arizona when, in 1975, I accompanied a couple of friends who wanted to drive to Phoenix from Lubbock. It was in June, and while Texas is certainly hot at that time of the year, it has nothing on Phoenix. One evening, as the sun went down and the temperature fell to 102°, someone was heard to say that it was nice that things had cooled off. Anyway . . . we spent a great deal of time either in a pool or inside bars with AC.

The second time I visited the state was in 1993, when I drove my mother and father out to visit my mother’s sister, who lived in Mesa. Again, June. Again, hot! I met two of Mother’s cousins, and when we all sat in a circle in one cousin’s living room, Mother looked more at home than I’d seen her in years, more genteel, more loquacious. She was at home! We visited a friend, an interior designer who’d bought an old adobe home and was remodeling it. Dinner with him was a respite from hauling the folks around.

R. Jespers, Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona — 2004

Ken and I visited Arizona again in 2004, staying with a cousin from my father’s side of the family, as well as working in a visit with my late mother’s cousin, whose wife and he greeted us with great hospitality, a meal, and a jar of preserves.

From Our Hotel Room, Gilbert, Arizona — 2017

In 2017, I visited my aunt who lives in Mesa, eighty-six at the time. She called together all my cousins, one of whom I hadn’t seen since we were children (see below). More of my family resides in Arizona than any other state in the union.

Jespers and Summers Cousins with Grandma & Grandpa Richards —1960

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania 21-Mississippi
10-West VA   22. New Mexico
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Bullets Into Bells

My Journey of States-17 Colorado

8/8/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
Ken Kesey
Born September 17, 1935, La Junta, Colorado
Died November 10, 2001, Eugene, Oregon

K. Kesey

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the seventeenth post of fifty.

Colorado (1964, 1965, 1967, 2000, 2011)

In my youth I was a church goer, mostly by default, de fault of my mother (har har). Our youth group spent two different week-long sessions in retreat at a cabin our minister owned near Silverton. It was a ten-hour drive from Wichita, and some of we luckier kids rode in the education director’s car, which had a rather new innovation: factory-installed air conditioning. You weren’t exhausted from the wind whipping your face hour after hour or from its roar in your ears. Your skin didn’t stick to the seats. She even let some of us drive! The retreats were great. Short on Bible and theological discussions and long on FUN. We hiked, made day-long climbs up particular mountains, cooked outside. And it was cool! No AC was needed as it was back in Wichita.

On my flight back from LA in 1967, my plane stopped in Denver. As I was flying standby, I was bumped from the flight to Wichita . . . late at night. I called my mother to explain what had happened. She encouraged me to spend the night in the airport, just sleeping on a bench, as she had during World War II, waiting for a train. I’d seen too many movies about people sleeping on hard benches and declared that I was staying in a motel. And I then lifted one of those white courtesy phones connected directly to a motel and took its shuttle. The room cost me eleven dollars, and I tipped the bell hop fifty cents and had no idea whether that was too much or too little. It had just rained and was in the mid-fifties. The air, after I had lived with the smog-filled air of LA for two weeks, seemed splendiferous, providing a natural AC.

In this century we’ve stayed with friends in Grand Lake (2000) and in Denver (2000 & 2011). In 2014 we drove widely around Denver on E-470, a toll road, not really wishing to partake of its urban sprawl. We spent the night in Pueblo, taking short trips out to see things such as Rosemount and the raptor center.

The Colorado Centennial was celebrated in 1976, the same year as the nation’s bicentennial year, the same year Ken and I began our longtime relationship.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana   16. Connecticut
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-13 New Jersey

7/11/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker
Born August 22, 1893, in Long Branch, New Jersey
Died June 7, 1967

D. Parker

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirteenth post of fifty.

New Jersey (1957, 1963)

The man my father’s older sister married, in 1939, was Italian. His father had come from Italy early in the twentieth century. In the sixties, that elderly gentleman lived in Vineland, and a carload of us sojourned from Washington DC one Sunday afternoon to visit Pop F. He was a rotund, white-haired man, quiet-spoken, taciturn to a fifteen-year-old like me. It was boring sitting around while the grow-ups yacked. My cousin, the swimsuit thief, is now probably older than his grandfather was the day we visited him in 1963. My eldest cousin, a college student at the time, winked at me and said, “I’m probably going to get to drive back to DC. Mom and Dad are too drunk.” ¶ The old Italian-American had what seemed like a small farm, compared to my grandfather’s wheat farm back in Kansas, but the man certainly had plenty of fresh vegetables. ¶ New Jersey, the butt of many jokes, is, in part, a bucolic state, not near as urban as its neighbor across the river. NJ is third of the original colonies, became a state in 1787. It celebrated its bicenquinquagenary in 2012.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12-Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-12 Virginia

5/2/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
William Styron
Born June 11, 1925
Died November 1, 2006

W. Styron

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twelfth post of fifty.

Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1974, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1999, 2010)

In Northern Virginia, where my aunt and uncle lived in Fairfax County, it was difficult to separate, at times, Washington DC from the southern nature of its surroundings. The lilting dialects, the Georgian colonial architecture with red bricks and white columns. Even the White House is a southern building. And yet my aunt and uncle were New Yorkers; it seemed like an odd fit. In the dozen times that I’ve been to Washington, I’ve viewed multiple sights multiple times: The Smithsonian Institution (including the Air and Space Museum located a thirty-minute cab ride from DC in Fairfax County), the Capitol, the Washington Monument, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s, the World War II Memorial, The Vietnam Memorial (I had previously looked up the address of our Wichita neighbor, R. E. Jenkins, who’d been killed at nineteen, as well as the man for who I’d worn a steel MIA bracelet, Stephen Adams, Iowa), Georgetown, Mt. Vernon, the home of former president, Chester A. Arthur (a bed and breakfast where we stayed in 2010), on Logan Circle. The closest I came to the White House was Pennsylvania Avenue, where I took an iPhone picture through the wrought iron fence. I’ve seen both of Thomas Jefferson’s homes, Monticello and the one in western Virginia, Poplar Forest, a three-day trip by horse cart for its original owner. I’ve strolled through the quad at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where the Jeffersonian buildings provide space for qualified students to live. ¶ Virginia is tenth of the original colonies, established in 1788.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-11 Maryland

4/25/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
Lucille Clifton
Poet Laureate of Maryland
Born June 27, 1936
Died February 13, 2010

L. Clifton

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the eleventh post of fifty.

Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963)

L-R: Lou, Carol, Richard, Victor | 1963 Visit to DC

In 1963, I was fifteen when we visited Aunt Gladys in Washington, DC. My cousin was seventeen, and he and his sophisticated friends invited me to go with them to the beach in Maryland. On our way we stopped in at Nordstrom’s in the Seven Corners shopping center. I watched as my sophisticated cousin and his friends shoplifted identical plaid swim trunks. We rode out in a red Impala convertible, and when the traffic backed up surprisingly, the driver, one of my cousin’s friends, headed for the soft grass median rather than rear-end someone. ¶ At this Maryland beach, my cousin and his friends looked like they all belonged to the same fraternity and flirted with girls older than they were just for the fun of it. I never told my parents what my cousin had done. It was one of those events that advanced your childhood pretty quickly, traveling with delinquents, and you knew you could never go back. ¶ In the Baltimore neighborhood where my aunt and uncle lived in 1957, people attached ceramic cats, mostly black, to the roofs and sides of their homes, perhaps as a way of identifying theirs as they approached it on the street. My dad bought one before leaving for Kansas and it hung on the side of their house in Wichita for over fifty years. ¶ Maryland became seventh of the original thirteen states in 1788. Its bicenquinquagenary was celebrated in 2013.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-9 Pennsylvania

4/11/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
Dorothy Allison
Born April 11, 1949

D. Allison

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the ninth post of fifty.

Pennsylvania (1957, 1959, 1963)

Barges. Coal. Coal dust. On our 1957 vacation, my family and I spent nearly three days in the mountain town of Brownsville, waiting for our Packard Clipper, a ’55, to be repaired. My mother tried hard to find ways to entertain us while we waited around on repairs that could never be made. She took movies of us running up and down the bank of the Monongahela River, me waving a jaunty striped cap I’d gotten for my ninth birthday. “Run, darn you,” my mother said. “It’s a moving picture.” And run we did, like little fools. The hotel where we stayed was so rife with coal dust that Mother had to wipe down everything (including the toilet seat) before we could sit.

The Jesperses' New 1957 Pontiac and Brother Vic

At the end of that brief but drawn-out respite, my parents bought a new 1957 Pontiac, and we broke it in on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was one of the oldest in the nation, and the roads were not that well engineered, not near as sleek as the Kansas Turnpike (you could travel at eighty mph), but it was certainly scenic. ¶ Philadelphia is the city where some of my grandmother’s German cousins lived, but when I try to google the address where they lived, it seems that the street must have disappeared or been renamed. It’s as if they never lived. The city is also where my Dutch grandparents landed in the early 1900s. ¶ Pennsylvania is the second of the original thirteen colonies, established in 1787. Over 230 years old!

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-7 Indiana

2/21/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Theodore Dreiser
Born August 27, 1871 Terre Haute, Indiana
Died December 28, 1945 California

T. Dreiser

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the seventh post of fifty.

Indiana (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 1976, 1994)

Shoals was our first stop when my family drove east in 1959. My father put in a good nine or ten hours of driving—over 650 miles and four states in one day. During that trip—before the interstate highway system was complete—we passed through downtown Indianapolis. My mother took a Super 8 film of the experience, flags billowing off some important building. Hot. Exhaust pouring in the windows of our Pontiac. On the second day, my father would drive through three states in one day (Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia), and we would think we were making grand time, but we were in the mountains and it took from dawn to dark to drive 550 miles. We were two hours from my aunt and uncle’s home in Falls Church, Virginia. It would be my third trip to Washington, DC, and I was only eleven!

In 1969, my college choir performed in South Bend, and I was able to visit with the daughter of one of mother’s high school teachers, Jo Leatherman Perkey, who made a special effort to see our performance. The choir had fun touring the Indy 500 track (above). ¶ Indiana is the nineteenth state. Residents celebrated its bicentennial in 2016.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction

My Journey of States-6 Illinois

2/14/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty—and all the rest of it.
Sam Shepard
Born Fort Sheridan, Illinois Nov. 5, 1943
Died Midway, Kentucky, July 27, 2017

S. Shepard

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the sixth post of fifty.

6. Illinois (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 2006)

When I was a child, Illinois was one of the four states my dad drove through in a single day as we headed to Washington DC to see my aunt and cousins. Beyond that, Illinois didn’t mean much to me until 1969, when my college choir’s tour included Chicago. In the middle of February with dirty snow piled onto the sidewalks like little mountains, a college friend and I walked under cloudy skies and chatted about what most twenty-one-year-olds do. The choir sang at a Methodist church in Evanston, and as a rising organ pupil I played the postlude. The sanctuary was cold. ¶ Even later, in 1976, Ken and I would venture across the Mississippi River to visit his grandparents’ old farm near Thebes, not far from Huck Finn’s haunt, Cairo. The humidity was so unbearable that we were drenched standing in full shade viewing his grandparents’ graves in the cemetery.

In 2006 we traveled on AmTrak from Fort Worth to New York and changed trains to the Lakeshore Limited in Chicago. We took a brisk walk around during our layover. It was early May, and the trees were just beginning to bud out. We’d already had ninety degree temps in Lubbock, so it seemed that we were stepping back in time.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

Illinois is the twenty-first state. Its centennial was held in 1918. The year 2018 will be another big one. Check it out!

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-5 Missouri

2/7/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
Born November 30, 1835, Florida Missouri
Died April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut

M. Twain

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fifth post of fifty.

5. Missouri (1956, 1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1976 + many others)

Richard and Brother Vic and Sister Peggy at Bagnell Dam, Missouri—1956

On my family’s first trip through the Show-Me state, in 1956, we visited Bagnell Dam in the Lake of the Ozarks. I imagine that we took U.S. Highway 54 because it was as a direct shot you could get from Wichita. The trip was a tryout for my brother, who was three at the time, to see how he would take to long periods in the car. During that trip we also visited mother’s family friends in Tipton, not more than an hour’s drive from the dam. We stayed in a mom-and-pop motel, and I witnessed one of the hardest rains I’ve ever seen in my life.

We traveled through Missouri every time we went back East to visit my dad’s family. One memorable sight were the charcoal factories that were nestled among the trees of the rolling hills. Some of them were partnered with rustic establishments where you could breakfast on eggs and smoked bacon. In Brownington is located the grave of my great-grandmother’s first husband, who drowned when, during a rainstorm, he drove a team of horses into a river, drowning him, his horses, and a calf loaded in his wagon. The year was 1884. ¶ My partner Ken’s family are all from the Saint Louis area. In the seventies I began to get a closer look at the state: clear streams and rivers, fried catfish, verdant woods and lawns, friendly people who embraced me as one of their own.

Richard Feeding the Fish at Missouri Hatchery—1976

Historical Postcards

Missouri is the twenty-fourth state. Its centennial was held in 1921, so it won’t be long until another hundred years have passed. I wonder why there is a forty-year gap between Missouri’s and Kansas’s statehood—so close and yet so far.

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana

NEXT TIME: My Book World