Among the highlights of my childhood were the summer vacation trips taken with my parents. Their style of vacationing was to visit the wonders of the West by car, and camping along the way.

To make this as convenient as possible, our father devised several ingenious containers for camping gear which were carried on and in the car.

A steel luggage rack was fastened to the back of the car behind the spare tire. He built two plywood boxes to fit onto the rack, one on top of the other. The top box was shallower and fitted with legs which clamped over the bottom box. The legs made both boxes the same height when set on the ground.

On our 1926 Buick, the running boards were set far enough below the bottom of the doors to permit boxes to be put on each running board and still permit the doors to be opened.

On the right side was a steel box made to fit exactly into this area. It was bolted to the running board. The box had sockets for wooden legs which raised it to standard table height. When the box was opened, the lid formed one table shelf, and a matching galvanized iron shelf hooked onto the other side. Inside were three compartments. At one end was a rectangular metal box with a screened cover which served as a cooler when hung from a tree or set into the bank of a cooling stream. The other end was a matching box which served as a dish pan. These and the center compartment were filled with food and other equipment.

Dad built a plywood box of the same dimensions to fit on the left running board. In it and in the rear boxes were stored all of our camping gear: an ingenious but complicated steel double bed frame; a "baker" tent which was essentially a rectangle with a sloping roof and a front flap, supported by wooden poles; a Coleman stove and lantern; an axe and shovel, which were required by law for all campers to carry in National Forests to help in fighting fires as well as for personal use; and other items for minimum comfort in a camping situation. The goal was to have a maximum of comfort at the campsite with a minimum of trouble in assembling and carrying the gear.

The back seat cushions of the car were removed and replaced with a set of kapok filled mattresses, with an oilcloth outer cover designed to keep out dust when carried outside a car. One of these was rolled up to serve as the back cushion and the other as the seat.

The boxes on the sides and back of the car made it unnecessary to carry awkward and wind resisting cargo on the roof, so we travelled in remarkable comfort for those times.

There was no such thing as air conditioning, of course, and I cannot recall even having fiddled on these trips with the evaporative cooling devices which could be attached to car windows to provide a meager measure of cooling in desert areas. But with a car capable of traveling as fast as 50 miles an hour on level ground, and with the luxury of windows which could be rolled up and down, who needed anything more?

Our first major trip, as well as I can establish the date, was in the summer of 1928. Our official destination was Colorado Springs, Colo., for a convention of Civil Service secretaries. During the convention week itself, we stayed in a Denver hotel, which was an incredibly luxurious experience for Frank and me, since I cannot remember having spent a night in a hotel before.

But on the way we camped. Our most memorable night was spent on the side of the road near the summit of Monarch Pass, which is at an elevation of 11,312 ft. on U. S. Highway 50.

As we climbed toward the summit in the late afternoon, the car began to cough and sputter. My folks decided it would be better to set up camp beside the road and try to solve the car problem the next morning. Frank and I were put into a small tent next to my parents' tent, with one of the kapok mattresses on our bed.

During the night the drizzle turned to rain. Frank and I woke up feeling wet and cold. We complained several times to our parents before Dad came over to feel the mattress. He soaked his hand up to the wrist the rain was dripping through a sag in the tent, and the oilcloth mattress cover was holding in the cold rain.

In desperation, Dad put Frank into the car with the blankets and I tried to squeeze in with my parents, but none of us slept very well.

The next morning we packed up our gear and sputtered on over the pass. When we got to a town at the foot of the grade, a local mechanic immediately identified the problem. The Buick had a new fangled "vacuum tank" to feed gas into the carburetor instead of a fuel pump. This worked fine at lower elevations, but the intake hole was too small for operation at higher altitudes. Enlarging the hole solved the problem, and we went on without further trouble.

When we got to Denver, we discovered that the street lights were hung over the center of the street, instead of being on the curbs as in California. Also, rubber stop signs were imbedded in the pavement. My Dad carefully steered around them until he saw they were rubber and not steel, and were to be driven over. Small details like this are more likely to be impressed on a small child's mind than major events and differences.

The following summer (1929, if I have my chronology right), we took off to explore the Southwest, particularly the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion and Mesa Verde National Parks.

Along the way, we made a detour to visit Pipe Spring National Monument, in the northwest corner of Arizona.

The terrain approaching it was semi desert, with long vistas where the road stretched ahead for miles. In the middle of the afternoon we came up over a rise and could see in the far distance a couple of cars beside the road, with several people near them.

Something about the scene made my father uneasy, and he stopped to dig out the police revolver he had borrowed for the trip from the Oakland police chief. With the gun on the seat beside him, we approached the cars and men.

When we got close, a man on a horse rode at us, and tried to lasso the car bumper with his lariat. My father stepped on the gas and we got away.

When we got to Pipe Spring, we discovered it was merely a pool of water enclosed with rocks. The situation was too tense and I was too young to understand the historical significance of it. (I learned since that it was established in 1923, so it was fairly new at the time and that may have made it more interesting to my parents than it deserved. Its chief significance was as the site of an old fort on the Kaibab Indian reservation).

We set up camp beside the pool. Just about dark, the Model T Ford which we had seen earlier came clattering up. In it were a group of very frightened students from Washington, D. C. They had been stopped by a group of drunken cowboys, who evidently made them feel that the West was even wilder than they expected it to be. Among other diversions they tried to teach the students how to ride a horse, and one of the students was the rider who had tried to lasso our car, hoping we would stop and rescue them.

Dad tried to reassure them, and saw to it that the sheriff was alerted through the local authorities at the Monument. A couple of hours later, while Frank and I were asleep, the cowboys drove up, looking for the students.

Mother told us later that when they stopped, Dad stepped into the beam of their headlights, with his revolver pointed at them, and ordered them out of the car. Then he held them until someone from the sheriff's office came to haul them off to jail.

The next morning we had to drive over to the county seat at Kanab, where the men were tried and Dad and the students were witnesses. The cowboys were local men who evidently got out of hand like that occasionally, so the judge was probably not as harsh with them as if they had been strangers. But when we saw the students a few days later at Bryce Canyon, they still seemed to be shaken by the experience. When they got back to Washington, D. C., they must have impressed their neighbors and friends with dramatic evidence that the West was truly as wild as in the Western novels and movies.

Another memorable trip focused on Crater Lake in Oregon. We camped for a week in the camp ground at the south end of the lake, and took trips out from there.

One day we hiked down to the edge of the lake, rented a boat and rowed over to Wizard Island, the "junior" volcanic cone which rises up above the lake surface. We hiked up to the crater of the island, and discovered there was still snow inside the crater, so we slid down the snow on the seats of our trousers a few times. Then when we got back to the edge of the lake, we were warm enough to feel like taking a swim. But when we dove in, we discovered the water was so cold it took our breath away, and we scrambled out as fast as we could. Later we discovered the average temperature at the surface of the lake is 41 degrees, and it is 39 degrees a foot or two down.

Another day we hiked up to the fire lookout at the top of one of the "peaks" on the southeast rim of the lake. It took us about an hour and a half to reach the lookout. One of the lookout rangers told us that they often went down to the headquarters at the bottom by "walking" down the pumice slope on the side of the rim which faced the lake. When we tried it, we discovered that the pumice, which was like sand, held our feet enough to keep us from falling head over heels, but permitted us to keep pulling our feet up and staying upright as we slid downward. Thus it took us less than ten minutes to traverse the same distance which had taken us an hour and a half to climb. It was skiing without skis or snow.