This is a history blog, and a travel blog, told literally and figuratively through the lens of an amazing woman.
Aunt Ruth in the Alps in 1948.
My Great Aunt Ruth was born in 1915. She graduated from Belmont High in Los Angeles in January 1933. As valedictorian, she received the only scholarship given at that time, during the height of the Great Depression. The scholarship was for $250. It paid for college tuition and books for two years at UCLA and set her on the path to getting an Master’s of Arts in Latin from Berkeley.
In 1938, Ruth started teaching Latin and English classes in Escondido at an agricultural community high school where the students often brought her avocados, citrus fruits, and cream.
After the start of WWII in 1941, Ruth decided to pursue a career that would help with the war effort. She took a job with the Red Cross Area Headquarters as Director of Red Cross for 29 schools in Berkeley and Albany. She moved to Berkeley and took additional classes at the University in counseling and administration. She recalls her time at the Berkeley and Albany schools as challenging and rewarding.
In 1948, Ruth saw a notice in the Berkeley Gazette recruiting teachers to teach in Germany and Austria for the U.S. Army. Ruth applied and was accepted on May 27, 1948. On July 25, she boarded a Western Pacific train bound for New York along with 15 other teachers from California. Despite heightened conflict between the Russians and the other Allies in Europe (this was just after the airlift), Ruth writes that she had “no fears” and was “eager to go.”
In August, 1948, at 33 years old Aunt Ruth boarded the Zebulon Vance, a former hospital ship, and headed for Europe, to each at an Army Dependents school in Linz, Austria. Between 1948 and 2013, the year of her death, my Great Aunt Ruth traveled the world.
Aunt Ruth kept copious notes on all her travels, and she kept many of the letters she had sent to her parents. After she died, I asked the family if I could have these diaries and letters. No one else really wanted them, so they were packed in a moving box and shipped to me. I remember eagerly opening the box, pulling out the old papers and notebooks, excited to see the profound things my savvy, well-traveled Aunt had written.
The moving box of Aunt Ruth’s diaries.
“We boarded the train at 2:35 pm. The coffee served in the dinner car was terrible.”
Seriously? That’s what I paid $38 to have shipped across the country—60 year old diaries about bad coffee in one place, delightful pastries in another? This was not exactly the profound, meaning-of-life nuggets I had been hoping for. This does not an award-winning, best-selling biography make.
I put this moving box away for a while, pulling it out every once in a while to glance at a different binder or notebook, only to tuck it away again, no closer to enlightenment. Perhaps I would just use her timeline as an outline and create a fictional story? Mild-mannered Latin teacher is actually a Cold War spy!
I didn’t get very far with that either.
So I changed my thinking—it’s not a book yet. I need to take these things in small bites; examine her microcosm against the macrocosm that Google can give me.
And an additional bonus–Ruth was an avid photographer, and extremely organized in preserving her photos, so I have thousands and thousands of images of amazing places taken at amazing times!
So that’s what I’m doing—a blog on 60+ years of travel, one tiny piece at a time. Welcome aboard!