Mrs. Klark and Miss Nutter Saw California the Delightful Way
A discarded scrapbook from a 1939 trip fell into the hands of this primary source enthusiast
I’ve had a box full of print materials from the first half of the 20th century in my classroom for a few years, but haven’t gone through them in a while. The vast majority of the collection is comprised of sheet music; the kind of pieces that don’t sell well at antique stores, which is why my wife was able to retrieve the box from the end of such a shop’s driveway four or five years back. I recently dug them out again and I’m glad that I did, because there were some treasures buried deep down. Pages of a scrapbook chronicling two women from Haverhill, Massachusetts’s 1939 cross-country trip stand out out from the stack of sheet music. They might not have much collectible or monetary value, but for someone who just eats up often-overlooked artifacts to get a front row view of the past, these are priceless.
Each of the souvenirs that were picked up and included in the scrapbook are fantastic and inspire mini vignettes to play out in the mind. I don’t dare try to break each down completely for this essay—maybe a few for the podcast—but I will look to see what the collection can tell us about the women, the places they went and the time period.
There’s an added appeal for me as my family and I are planning our own trip from New England to California for this summer, and some of the trip seems to follow the same itinerary…using 1939 means of course.
And it’s the itinerary that’s glued onto one of the pages that starts and completes this collection. Without evidence of the planning stages of the trip and the participants, much of the other items are static and without much depth.
The not-so-depressing side of the Depression era
Mrs. Susan Klark and Miss Sallie Nutter worked with Bassett’s Tours and Travel Bureau to create a three week trip that would take them by train from Haverhill to Boston through to Chicago and then to San Francisco. A drive down the coast to Los Angeles came next and after a few days sightseeing there, out to the Grand Canyon, then back to Chicago, followed by New York and finally back home to Massachusetts.
The trip itself speaks very loudly about the time period and quiets some traditional assumptions about the 1930s in America. History books and documentaries often simplify the era as simply The Great Depression, as if everyone was selling apples or pencils in New York City after losing it all on Wall Street. The whole country wasn’t one big Dorothea Lange photoshoot by any means.
That’s not to say times were not tough by 1939. Haverhill, like so many other eastern cities, was suffering from a decline in manufacturing during the period and the effects of the poverty that caused were most assuredly being noticed there. But Susan and Sallie must have either scrimped and saved for the trip, or belonged to a middle to upper-middle class that, while having been banged up and shrunk down over the previous ten years, wasn’t totally defeated. This trip likely cost a decent amount of money as all the transportation was either by rail or otherwise hired wheels.
The hotels, too, were not of the bargain variety. The pair’s first California accommodations were at the Hotel Bellevue in San Francisco, a hotel which cost over $1 million to build in 1910, and considered one of the finest in the city, if not the country, by mid century. The Biltmore, where Susan and Sallie stayed while in Los Angeles, was no slouch either, nor was the Mayflower, one of the first Hilton Hotels, which stood across the street and whose postcard appears in the scrapbook.
Although the travelers seemed to make their way around in style, the creation of the scrapbook and the items they made sure to include may give insight into their socio-economic status. It is not certain how much time went by after returning home to Massachusetts before the scrapbook was made—maybe a week, maybe years—but the fact that tickets, menus, playbills, and postcards found their way in as keepsakes could solidify the idea of Susan and Sallie being middle class women who saved up money for the trip. If this was their usual idea of a few weeks away, they probably wouldn’t have been touring about as much and they would be less likely to place tokens of their trip into a large book to impress friends and family.
Getting there and Getting around
By 1939 cars had made their presence known in America but it was still a country of and for the railroads. Passenger air travel was still in its infancy and taking a liner from Boston to San Francisco was possible, but not as practical as taking the train. There are several ticket stubs for rail travel included in the scrapbook, and they give insight on two people out of millions who were quite familiar with navigating to places near and far using timetables and train changes.
A world’s fare
The Pullman Company offered special transportation to connect The New York’s World’s Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition, which were being held simultaneously on either side of the country. These expositions provide further evidence that the Great Depression was not as all-encompassing as some histories likes to convey. As a way to promote and show off the achievements made in innovation, business and culture, as well as to open up global relationships in these areas, these world’s fairs are hardly reflective of a period where the country was on the brink of collapse. In fact, the San Francisco fair was held to celebrate the recent construction of the two bay bridges, something that could not have happened if the US was falling apart for the duration of the decade.
But although Susan and Sallie utilized this passage and kept the ticket as a souvenir, there isn’t any indication in the itinerary or elsewhere that they visited the Golden Gate exposition or the New York fair on the way back home.
Once in California the pair made their way from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of parlor car; the automobile version of a fancy train car by the same name. The California Parlor Car Tours Company presented tourists with a four day trip from San Francisco to LA by way of Yosemite Valley and along the coast. The auto tour is referenced in the brochure the two travelers picked up from their travel agent and is referred to as being for “Limousine Minded People.” This expression and the title “parlor car” may elevate Susan and Sallie’s social status in our mind, but that’s mainly because of what Limousines has come to mean in our vernacular. We’ve come to understand them as only the stretch version that were used by the very wealthy in the 1970s and 80s, and for special occasions for everyone else. But all the term really means, then and now, is a chauffer-driven car with a partition between them and the passengers.
The fact that travelers needed a ticket book and sat alongside strangers in what was essentially one step up from a coach bus (think It Happened One Night), brings us back to the understanding that Susan and Sallie were not Haverhill royalty, they were more likely middle class.
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