Anybody ever heard relatives talk about when the first cars appeared in their town?

[raccoon]

I never asked mine, and anyone who would be old enough to remember is no longer with us.

[rrneck]

1. My uncle used to tell me

about a practical joke they used to pull as kids. Apparently they used to park model A's bumper to bumper, so they would fix up a battery or magneto somehow at one end of the line of cars and ground it at the other and wait for somebody to touch the door and get a bit of an electric shock.

[murielm99]

2. My dad used to talk about the first tractors.

His dad farmed with horses for years after tractors were around. Part of it was that grandpa loved his horses. His sons eventually got a tractor. My dad is the oldest son. He is eighty-four.

The old guy who owned our property lived to be ninety-one. He would be one hundred two if he was still around. He told me about how the highway in front of our house used to be paved on one lane for the gas powered vehicles and unpaved on the other for the horse driven traffic. His father never did get the hang of driving a truck or a tractor. It is sort of the same way with some older people now and computers. My old friend had to do all that on the farm, with the gasoline powered vehicles. He was the youngest of six. His grandfather homesteaded this place when Buchanan was President.

I have never met anyone around here who had family who remember the Black Hawk War. I would like to hear some relatively firsthand accounts of that. It happened right around here. We had a tree in the back that my old friend told me had been around since the Black Hawk War. It was so old and huge that I believe it. It died a few years ago and had to be removed. I am glad he was gone and did not live to see the demise of that wonderful old tree. Even though he was in the nursing home toward the end, he was still sharp. I would have had to tell him about the tree.

[Tikki]

3. My mother-in-law and three of her 4 sisters never drove..

The youngest sister drove occasionally. All born in the stretch of the 20's.
My mother born in '13 drove her whole life...all these women grew up rural, so!?...:shrug:

Tikki

[raccoon]

9. Gosh, you must be old.

:hi: Thanks for sharing!

[Tikki]

10. I'm getting there...

:P


Tikki

[struggle4progress]

4. No. But I remember reading a LTTE in a very old newspaper in which

the person complaining that automobiles were hurtling through town at 15 mph and demanding the speed limit be reduced

And my oldest relative remembers with a chuckle how as a kid he encouraged his father to really step on the gas and drive 30 mph

[kayakjohnny]

5. An old lady once told me of riding in a horse-drawn wagon down a dirt path

from Tampa to Ocala. If I remember correctly it was two days to get there, and two to get back. Sounds about right.

It's roughly 80 miles. Guess it was doable. Even though 40 miles in a wagon in a day sounds ambitious.

She was a little girl, but seemed to remember the trip quite well.

[Brother Buzz]

6. My grandfather had the first motorcycle in the county

He purchased it in San Francisco in 1906 and rode it back to Lake county, that is, after he rode the ferry across the bay.

A horse, a motor launch, and a motorcycle - All Three!

[Old Troop]

7. I don't remember anyone talking about the first cars, but my grandmother

often talked of horse-drawn travel from Lynn, MA to North Conway, NH when she was a child. My father mentioned horse drawn vehicles used by the rag man, the fats man and others in Cambridge, MA during the 20s. My wife remembers the rag man coming down her street in a wagon during the early 60s!

[applegrove]

8. My grandfather was a country doctor when the first cars came out. He had one of the earliest cars in

his neck of the woods. Don't know the make or model. There are pictures of him on a house call with horse and wagon.

[MorningGlow]

11. Not the first, but

my mom and her siblings often talked about their cars in the '30s. Big memories: traveling less than 10 miles to her grandmother's farm for fresh eggs was a major undertaking--they reserved the whole day for it. Packing the entire family into the car (two parents, four kids) and driving to NYC for the 1939 World's Fair. My mom and my aunt, the two youngest, sat on stools on the floor of the back seat. The door latch gave way and my mom fell out. Luckily they weren't going very fast. (But that explains a lot of things about her... :evilgrin:) And my uncle driving the car to fetch the doctor when the whole family was down with some serious illness (I forget which). He was 13 at the time.

[Xithras]

12. Yep. Pretty funny too.

Some guy was trying to drive from the SF Bay up to Yosemite back before there were paved roads to do it on. He lost control on a muddy curve, the car went over an embankment, and rolled a few times before stopping in a totalled heap. The driver was thrown clear and was unhurt, so he walked back to the closest town, caught the train, and went home (no wreckers, police reports, or insurance claims in those days). A local blacksmith heard about the wreck and paid the farmer who owned the land about $20 for the car and to get it hauled back into town to his blacksmith shop ($20 was the equivalent of a few hundred bucks nowadays).

The blacksmith originally planned on tearing it apart for scrap metal, but after talking to his neighbor the wagon-wright, they came up with another idea. They pulled the wrecked body off the car, made some new wheels for it, and rebuilt the whole thing in wood. My grandfather told me that it looked like the "bastard offspring of an old haywagon and a Model A"...because that's exactly what it was. That was the first, and for several years the ONLY, functioning automobile in his town.

The town deputy only had one rule for him: "You can't drive it faster than I can jog."

[Courtesy Flush]

13. Define "relative"

You mean blood relative, or can they be related by marriage?

I assume adoptions count, right?

I hate trick questions.

[PufPuf23]

14. Mules and airplanes

My maternal grandparents tell of coming to my home town with my Mom as a toddler in a flour sack on a mule in 1916 where they were to run a small store owned by the mule packing company.

My Dad was born here (I returned "home" in my age) and there was not road access until 1921 and freight was by mule rather than wagon because of the rugged terrain and dense vegetation.

I have a Sunset Magazine travel book of the area published in 1923. The author came here by auto, went by horse or mule another 8 miles upriver, and the last two chapters of the travelogue are riding an Indian dugout back downriver to the Pacific with vivid descriptions.

My Dad developed an airport in the mid 1930s that was closed in the mid 1970s. Now the nearest airport of any kind is an 85 mile drive.

Several years ago the local US Forest Service office had an exhibit of old photos. One photo was annotated as the first airplane to land here. I recognized the photo and looked at some old photos I had been given by my grandmother. There was the same bi-plane but a different photo. There was a group of people in their best clothes, a dog standing on a wing, and, curiously, in the background a maypole with a group of young girls.

Here are two books about the area:

http://www.amazon.com/Bellboy-Muletrain-Margaret-S-McClain/dp/0962246816/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

Ms. McClain was my great grandmother's niece and we never met but wrote to each other back in the 1990's. One of the chapters about a gold mining family is loosely based on my great grand parents and their children. I live on that property now.

http://www.amazon.com/Land-Grasshopper-Song-Klamath-Country/dp/0803267037/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283454078&sr=1-1

This book has my family as prominent characters and I have been interviewed several times by academics and by a group (Del Arte Players) that put on a play loosely based upon the book.