Off to see her sister: the bus ride to Chicago begins

Now one day I went, got a letter from my sister and she asked me to come that she don't feel too good and so forth. So my husband says, well, go ahead for a few days. And so I went.

And I went on a bus this time because train is quite noisy and we had a nice bus. He took me to the bus to Rice Lake and from there I went on to O 'Clair and Madison and on to Chicago.

Well, we got to Chicago about, I would say, about midnight or 11 .30 something. And the bus man had a little trouble with the bus. It would stop partially, and he doctored it, and it jerked and so forth.

And so when we got down to the big bus, that was some experience, too. I didn't know, but they got an underground bus depot in Chicago. I don't know exactly what part of Chicago. Anyhow, it was raining something fierce when we got there.

And I know we went down the ramp with the bus, and there was all kinds of other buses and people running around there and were thinking, he went to some offices and stuff, and he must complain about his bus, because we were all, most of us were in the bus yet waiting, what if we're going to change?

He says, we might have to change a bus. and we had to change the bus driver from Chicago to Toledo he had the next day he told me next day he slept and the third day he'd go in the morning from Toledo to Chicago and there he stayed you know a few hours to rest stuff and then he went back to Toledo well this is an older guy with red hair and you know maybe about 55 50 55 all years old and he was coming into the cab, and he said to the bus, and he says, the management assigned us to an upper deck bus,

brand new one, and so you all have to move. They are already moving the luggage that was underneath the bus, you know. So one by one we crawled out, and he showed us which bus we crawled in there and that there must have got 40, 40 of us or maybe more.

And of course, it didn't rain in the bus, people, so we didn't know how the weather was outside. And children were sleepy, the parents were caring of them and all that. And here we sees a young fellow with wife and three children.

And the young fellow, we didn't know that he was the father of the three kids, he looked like a 17, 18 -year -old boy himself. He never even shaved. He had a few curly -kew hairs on his chin and two, three, under his nose.

And he looked ridiculous. He had something over on his boots yet from Iowa, where he comes from Manna, Iowa. And his wife had one of those little white bonnets to hold her hair in. And the little baby was maybe a year old, and the little girl, maybe.

maybe three, and the boy may be five. And the girl and the boy held their hands together so they wouldn't. And the smallest one of the two, the girl was holding onto his mother's skirt. And the father went ahead and to this other bus.

And lo and behold, another one. And not such a bright expression he didn't have on his face, but he was quite a look quite a bit like the first one. And he had homemade burlap something and, you know, denim jackets and wooden buttons and he and rough shoes and stuff.

And they had black hats with the straight out rins, the little boys. Oh, and the second fellow that went, his wife followed him with the baby. Same thing. And there was another, a girl about five and a boy, maybe about.

to two and a half, so barely could walk. And they were holding hands, and they were holding out to the mother's curtain, and they followed the father into this new bus.