Those who are interested in me already know my name.
So I don't know why it would be of interest to anybody else, but by way of an introduction
I ought to say that my name is John Dunn. I live in Dearborn, Michigan.
I have a grandson who records things of this sort and he's asked me to sit down here
and do some storytelling and I'll do it to the best of my ability.
I started going when in 1932 or 1933 when I was 7 or 8 and I went every year until probably 1941.
And that was the years of the Great Depression.
So I got some interesting information from that kind of background and I saw the change
that took place in those people's lives, which I'll mention in just a minute.
Kentucky has to be the most, in a way, the most influential place I've ever been in my life.
I learned to know my relatives as people who were a part of my almost immediate family
and it was wonderful the way they accepted me.
Think about it, my folks would send us down there with no particular person in charge of us
and my brother and I would go and we would just simply be with those people
and when we were on one farm we would decide we wanted to be on another farm
or we would just walk down the highway and go to the other farm
so that we did a lot of traveling around on our own and nobody kept us from doing anything.
As a kid, how can you have it better?
But the trip's going down there was something because my father never had a car
and he would go home anyway. I never understood why he wasn't interested
going back to his homeland any more than he did because he went to a few times.
But they would decide, okay, the kids are going to be going in June
so they would run an ad in the paper or else they would read the ads in the paper
and people often put in things like, we're going to Iowa, anybody want to go with us?
We're going to California where you can offer you a ride.
And he would find the Kentucky people and people going down to Kentucky
and one day they would call them and one day this car would fall in front of our house
and we'd be ready and we'd get in the car and we'd get in and we'd travel off with these people
talking about the change in the procedure for the way kids are shipped.
That was it. It was a little more complicated than that
because my parents would talk to the people and say, well, you know what particular part do you live in
and have you lived elsewhere?
And all of a sudden they would discover that they knew certain people
so they would make that connection and decide that these people were safe to ship us off with.
We weren't always safe because one time a man had not had enough sleep
and we weren't out of Michigan very long before he started nod over the wheel
and everybody else in the car is going to sleep too and I'm not going to sleep
because I'm watching that driver.
And finally he ran off the road and we went into a culvert
and the side of the car was leaning against one of the hill part of the culvert here
and we were speeding toward a drive which had been built so that it's all concrete.
We're heading toward the concrete. We stopped a few feet this shy of it
and the man's wife was slightly injured so we had to go to a hospital
and we got in way, way late that evening
but that was one of the trips that I can't forget.
There were other times when I went with an uncle of mine
who used to have difficulty driving
and his son would drive for a period of time and then get tired
and he'd say, Dad, do you want to drive?
And my uncle would say, sure.
But he no sooner got in the car that we started to get off onto the side
and kick up gravel and then we'd go back over the median line in the middle
and cars would blow their horns at us as they passed
and the son would sleep as much as he could
but he couldn't put up with this either so he would say,
I'm feeling a lot better, Dad, but let me get behind there.
And one time we were on our way
and you go down to Kentucky to a place where you make a turn
and you're going to go north or you're going to go south to Kentucky
and my uncle was driving and he took the wrong turn
and when we realized where we were we were close to Chicago.
So in those days people practiced taking care of all contingencies
and so they had a lot of blankets in the trunk
and what we did when we all got tired,
we pulled over beside the road and put the blankets out in the field
and we all went to sleep that night.
It sounds like you're talking about the middle ages
and that's what it was, it was back in the middle ages.
