Mitsi, our '36 Ford and my first trip to South Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana and Utah

In the year 1947 my father purchased a 1946 eight cylindar 100 horse power engine for his 1936 Ford convertible. He had the car painted eggshell blue color. It had a rumble seat. He fitted the vehicle with a cover so that one could ride in the rumble seat in any weather. He also had a luggage rack made with straps to hold the suitcases. Here is a photo of my maternal grandfather C Frank Worman:

Thus outfitted my father and mother and I traveled west from Manhattan, NYC, to Allentown, Pennsylvania where we visited Aunt Edna Schatz (424 north 10th street) and my grandfather C Frank Worman (337 north 8th street). My grandfather was a contractor, he had built the house, doing some of the construction work himself. He was also an amateur photographer. The photo of my grandfather was taken during a trip to Texas that my parents did a few years before I was born. After a few days we journeyed onward via the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Mitsi to Pittsburgh, PA, where we stayed with Martha and Ellis Kleckner. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was an exciting road, it was the first high speed limited access divided highway in the country. Ellis was an officer in the Pittsburgh Steel Company. Ellis had a rifle which he fired into the sky, it then being the 4th of July. From Pittsburgh we journeyed through Ohio and the mid-west via Route 66 to Albuquerque. There, we visited with my sister Reva and her husband Ralph Edgel and their two children, Stephen (my age) and Reed, his younger brother. They lived at 601 Vassar Drive N.E. From Albuquerque we drove northwest to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I met my grandmother Marion Elizabeth Mitchell Hand. She like my grandfather Worman I knew only in their last years when they were mostly bedridden. On the way to SLC we stopped to visit with my sister Leola and her family in St. George, Utah. In the Sale Lake area we stayed with my Uncle David and my sister Marion in Sandy. Our trip back home took us through Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota. I remember Devil's Tower, Yellowstone National Park, Jenny Lake, the Tetons, Glacier National Park and Deadwood S.D. where Wild Bill Hikok was shot in the backand killed by Jack McCall while gambling with cards. It seems that for once he sat with his back to the entrance foor. I attended a reinactment of the trial of Jack McCall. It still takes place in Deadwood in 2026: https://www.deadwood.com/business/pastport/trial-jack-mccall/ My parents traveled to the Golden West with me in Mitsi during three successive summers, 1947, '48 and '49. Each time we made the journey I was excited to arrive in South Dakota, the beginning of the Rocky Mountaiins. I liked the rumble seat though most of the time I sat between my parents and played Zit and Zat. The first person to see a white horse would call out "zit" whereas a black horse was a "zat." Onde day I saw 84 zits but no zats.