Here I am all ready to go to my favorite summer escape–Camp Namanu. I have finally learned how to roll up my Army surplus, down filled, mummy sleeping bag. There were a lot of very warm sleeping bags for sale after the Korean War, and we had six of them. In case you are unfamiliar with a mummy sleeping bag, it is called that because once you have zipped it up, only your face peeks out, making you look like a mummy. Unfortunately, it was very easy to get turned around in the night and I was afraid I would suffocate before I could find the face opening! I didn’t want to be an actual mummy.

But the star of this photo is the rear end of our famous “B-Mobile” named in honor of my mother Betty who drove it. With four kids, they bought a station wagon to haul us all around. Of course, in case you had any doubts, it was a FORD. This model of station wagons was relatively new , accommodating the large families that people, including ours, were having. Our family of 4 was actually rather small in my neighborhood.

This is a picture of a 1953 Ford Wagon, and I think ours was a 1954, but they were very similar. This had a front seat, a middle seat, and a way back with no seats. Tomorrow I will write about our cross country adventures in the B-Mobile. Our East Coast cousins, living in suburban New York City had the Cadillac of station wagons.

But they actually used it to take my uncle to the train station for his daily commute to Manhattan. These wood paneled wagons became famous with surfers in the years to come. “I bought a ’30 Ford wagon and we call it a woodie
(Surf City, here we come)”