Single people stormed Route 66 and should have kept being single

In April, I visited the Grand Canyon with my family: my mother, father, brother, sister-in-law, 12-year-old nephew, 10-year-old nephew, 7-year-old niece, and two guides from Mountain Based. We’ve been meeting up for these national park trips for three years. In spite of the pandemic, we did not want to miss the little ones growing up.

To get to the Grand Canyon, we passed through Williams, an Old West-style town off Historic Route 66. It was here I felt ancestral déjà vu, a ghost tug.

The ancestor in question? My grandmother, Lela Blair. A native of Petroleum, Indiana, she was also a graduate of Ball State Teachers College.

I pulled out my phone to find the pictures I took of her old scrapbook, her record of when she traveled across the country. Based on her Grand Canyon pics, she must have also passed through Williams in the summer of 1938.

Her three companions included her college roommate Gertie, Gertie’s brother, and a young man who in fought in World War II — and was lost at sea. Granny and her friends (plutonic relationships only) must have driven all the way from Indiana to the start of Route 66 in Chicago.

Then they kept going in their 1937 Plymouth (no air conditioning). Taking turns at the wheel, Granny and her friends tested new infrastructure that connected the country. Thanks to the Civilian Conservation Corp, a Depression-era program, young unemployed men helped make landmarks, like the Grand Canyon, more accessible to visitors.

Driving to the Grand Canyon back then must have been rough, especially on winding mountain roads. To plan any accommodations, they relied upon back-and-forth communique through the postal service. Everything else was about chance.

Lela Marie Blair Holloway, my grandmother in 1938

Take a moment to look at this woman — this nice Methodist woman — standing on the rim in her sensible high-heeled sandals and round glasses.

Wow!

She’s about 23 years old, wearing a flutter dress with a pussy bow she sewed herself. Other photographs suggest she brought a jacket and a blouse and pair of pants for the WHOLE trip to California and all the way back.

Enjoy a few more here, made more joyful with her perfect cursive handwriting.

She returned to Indiana to marry my grandfather.

“I was almost an old maid,” she once told me. “But then your grandpa saved me.”

To define terms, “old maid” was an unmarried woman, a crone, who was 25 years of age or older.

Personally, I think Granny married the wrong man. What’s my basis? Let’s see. My grandpa John Holloway, a widower, didn’t want to spend the money on a wedding photograph because he’d had one taken before with his last wife. Maybe he was frugal. [UPDATE: Family sources remind me that my grandfather was also superstitious. He may have been afraid that replicating his first wedding might end in tragedy.]

As long as I knew them, they fought. When Granny washed Grandpa’s hair in the sink before church, she had things to tell him. What he said back wasn’t easy to understand — he’d had at least one stroke — but I’m sure he wasn’t reciting a psalm.

Without their union, I wouldn’t be here, at least in my present form. And this present form is me, a collection of female cells that is almost 50 years old.

Miracle of miracles, as a single woman, I take up enough space to appear in a mirror or photo without vanishing. And I can open my own bank account and have my own line of credit to boot.

Here I am (left) in April 2024, restaging Granny’s photo (right). I wore workout pants with slush guards on the ankles. My coat, from L.L. Bean, can divide into two lighter jackets. Granny, as mentioned earlier, is wearing sensible high-heeled sandals and a homemade flutter dress.

Of the two of us, I’m the wimp with all the high-tech comforts.