History of John Smith Griffin
page 72
Berkeley - 1946
Everything went well until we hit the Alleganey mountains. We started up and before we had go more than a mile or two my radiator was boiling madly. I stopped at a service station and the attendant told me that I had a collapsed radiator hose and the water was not flowing the way it should. I had 3 new hoses put on and started out again. I had gone only a few miles until it was boiling again. By going slow and stopping to let it cool I finally got over the mountains. To my dismay, however, I found that on the open road the radiator would boil whenever I would go over 40 miles an hour. As we were going along I saw a sign on a garage "Radiators Reversed Flushed" so I thought I had better stop and have it done. After taking two and a half hours and $12 of my precious cash we were on our way again, this time I was sure, trouble free. I found that you should never be sure of anything because we had gone only about ten miles when the temperature of the cooling system was up to boiling again. By that time it was late in the afternoon and as it began to cool off, I could go 50 miles an hour without it boiling.
We made good time until about 10 that evening. I had slept only a few hours the night before and I was getting awfully tired. I asked my companion if she didn't think we should stop for the night. She seemed surprised and said "I thought you were going to drive straight through." I then realized that she meant that we would not stop at night but drive until we arrived in Salt Lake.
I told her that this was not what I had meant when I said that I was driving straight through to Salt Lake, however, if she would take her turn at driving I would be willing to do it. She hesitated and finally told me that she had not had much experience at driving a car. I told her to take it over when we got out on a road that was not crowded, and it did not take me long to find out that she knew very little about driving a car. So I took the wheel again and drove on until I just could stay awake no longer. In the meantime she had slept most of the afternoon and evening. I pulled over to the side of the road and finally dozed off. About two hours later I awoke and we started out again. I kept going until we reached Grand Island, Nebraska about 11:30 the second evening. I told her that I just could not go any further and was stopping there for the rest of the night. I stayed at the hotel and got a good six hours sleep. We left at 6 the next morning and arrived at Salt Lake about 11:30 that evening. After letting her off in Salt Lake I went on to Ogden, arriving just about 14 hours after Dorothy and the kids. It was good time, but I surely paid for it later.
The next day I took the car down to the Pontiac agency to see if they could do something to stop it heating. I knew that I would never make it across the desert from Ogden to San Francisco in July unless I found out the trouble and had it fixed. They knew just what to do and put in a new distributor tube that went down through the engine block to distribute the water to the back cylinders so it would cool them. The old tube had almost completely corroded away.
A few days later Dorothy and I left for San Francisco, leaving the kids with my relatives there in Ogden, until I could find housing for the family in the San Francisco area. At this time my uncle Jess lived in Berkeley and he and his wife were visiting in Utah and so offered to let us stay at their place while we were hunting a home. For three or four days we looked all over the San Francisco area for a place to live, with little success. We decided that we would have to buy a house in order to obtain lodging. Our trouble was that we had very little money to use as a down payment and there were very few homes available that could be purchased with a small down payment.
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