Week 20: Travel #52ancestors
If anyone reads this in years to come, we are still pretty much locked down by the COVID-19 pandemic. My county (Skagit) is getting close to being able to open up due to declining numbers of new cases (I think only one in the last week or so) and no new deaths. As you can imagine, this has put a crimp in any travel plans I may have had! Nonessential travel is out for the moment: the furthest I've gone is to Renton to pick up my new sewing machine, which I did over a month ago. And travel has always been a feature of my life so this is getting kind of hard.
As to that travel: My father, Cecil Prewitt, always had an itchy foot. The story he always told us was that he ran away and joined the circus around 1933, after he finished high school in Olympia, Washington. Now, my father was a bit of a story teller and this never seemed like an incredibly likely event, but lo and behold! there is some confirmatory information, if not of his participation, at least of the existence of the circus he claimed to have joined as a roustabout. This was the Al G. Barnes circus, which Dad claimed was the last to be making a profit at the time. He told me that he crossed the continent, as far as Nova Scotia, having started somewhere on the west coast of the U.S. Sure enough, when one of my own children was doing a circus history project in elementary school, there in a history of circuses was the Al G. Barnes circus, described as one of the last profitable circuses in the 1930s. A quick look through Google reveals that the Al G. Barnes Circus got some unanticipated publicity in 1922 when their elephant "Tusco" got loose in Sedro-Woolley Washington (I was born in Sedro-Woolley over 30 years later), destroying a Model T Ford and knocking over fences and telephone poles.
The circus may have whetted Dad's appetite for travel because he certainly kept it up for the rest of his life. He joined the Navy and saw the world, then rejoined it when World War II was on the horizon and mostly saw the Aleutians. When work began to dry up, he found a job in Italy in the spring of 1962 and we spent a few months living in Taranto on the instep of the boot. The next year we went to Beer Sheba Israel while he worked on a construction project on the Dead Sea. Following that, we wandered up and down the west coast from Washington state to California and back again, until eventually we ended up back in Olympia. All of this interspersed with road trips to Glacier National Park, or Colorado to see my sister, or back to California to see family. My parents flew to London to see my sister (who moved even more than we did).
After my mother's death, Dad was at loose ends for several years. He did come to visit me on the East Coast several times, once taking the train through Canada. Finally, he decided he'd always wanted to visit Thailand and so he went for a month, thoroughly enjoying himself. Not long after he returned home, it became apparent that he was developing some health problems (unrelated to the travel), and he passed away about a year later.
It does seem to be a lasting legacy however. I travel a good bit in non-pandemic years and my kids are devoted road trippers and travelers as well. We are looking forward to the day when we can pack our bags and head out again!
As to that travel: My father, Cecil Prewitt, always had an itchy foot. The story he always told us was that he ran away and joined the circus around 1933, after he finished high school in Olympia, Washington. Now, my father was a bit of a story teller and this never seemed like an incredibly likely event, but lo and behold! there is some confirmatory information, if not of his participation, at least of the existence of the circus he claimed to have joined as a roustabout. This was the Al G. Barnes circus, which Dad claimed was the last to be making a profit at the time. He told me that he crossed the continent, as far as Nova Scotia, having started somewhere on the west coast of the U.S. Sure enough, when one of my own children was doing a circus history project in elementary school, there in a history of circuses was the Al G. Barnes circus, described as one of the last profitable circuses in the 1930s. A quick look through Google reveals that the Al G. Barnes Circus got some unanticipated publicity in 1922 when their elephant "Tusco" got loose in Sedro-Woolley Washington (I was born in Sedro-Woolley over 30 years later), destroying a Model T Ford and knocking over fences and telephone poles.
The circus may have whetted Dad's appetite for travel because he certainly kept it up for the rest of his life. He joined the Navy and saw the world, then rejoined it when World War II was on the horizon and mostly saw the Aleutians. When work began to dry up, he found a job in Italy in the spring of 1962 and we spent a few months living in Taranto on the instep of the boot. The next year we went to Beer Sheba Israel while he worked on a construction project on the Dead Sea. Following that, we wandered up and down the west coast from Washington state to California and back again, until eventually we ended up back in Olympia. All of this interspersed with road trips to Glacier National Park, or Colorado to see my sister, or back to California to see family. My parents flew to London to see my sister (who moved even more than we did).
After my mother's death, Dad was at loose ends for several years. He did come to visit me on the East Coast several times, once taking the train through Canada. Finally, he decided he'd always wanted to visit Thailand and so he went for a month, thoroughly enjoying himself. Not long after he returned home, it became apparent that he was developing some health problems (unrelated to the travel), and he passed away about a year later.
It does seem to be a lasting legacy however. I travel a good bit in non-pandemic years and my kids are devoted road trippers and travelers as well. We are looking forward to the day when we can pack our bags and head out again!
My parents in 1962, in Italy, possibly Naples.
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