Young men seek adventure especially when they are living in a small town, out of school and out of work. That’s true today and it was true in the past. The particular adventure story I’m going to tell you took place in 1937 (my estimate) and one of the young men was my father, Vernon R. Knight. He and his friends, J. V. Averitt, Charles E. Covington, and Hugh Dickson, set off to see the country in an old car that belonged to one of them.

My father never talked about this trip. The only way I knew about it was through a conversation with my aunt, his sister, after his death. We were going through some old pictures. We didn’t know where some of the pictures were taken so we asked her about them. She said, “Those must be from the ‘trip to nowhere.'”

Aunt Sissy went on to tell us about how my father and his friends took an old car and headed west. They drove as far as they could on the money they had, and then they stopped and found work. One place they worked was in the oil fields in Texas. When they had enough money, they started out again.

Somewhere along the road my father bought a camera. This old style camera, that expanded when you opened it up to expose the lens, was always in a drawer in the dining room along with an old photo album. As kids we would take out the camera and examine it with the natural curiosity of children. We would also take out the old photo album and flip through the pictures, amazed at what our parents looked like when they were young.

The first pictures in the album from the “trip to nowhere” were taken at Hoover Dam (known as Boulder Dam at the time). These helped me date the trip. Hoover Dam was completed in 1935. In 1936 the water in Lake Mead was high enough to begin electrical generation. It took some time for water to fill Lake Mead. In my Dad’s pictures, the lake is almost full so I am guessing it was a year or two after completion of the dam.

The next pictures find our young men in the Petrified Forest in Arizona. At that point they would have been along Route # 66. J. V. Averitt told his son, Phil, about how many times they had to patch the tires on the old car. Back then, tires had inner-tubes, that held the air, inside the outer tire. If the tube got a hole in it, they would take the inner-tube out, patch it, then put it back inside the outer tire before re-inflating it.

The next group of pictures are landscape shots. My father probably took them because the terrain was so different from what they were familiar with in Tennessee. These are pictures of the desert alongside the road, possibly in Arizona or New Mexico.

Only a couple of the pictures featured any of the young men. My Dad apparently didn’t want to take pictures of people. After the photos of the desert there are no more pictures from this trip. Did he run out of film? Maybe, but I don’t know.

The only other thing I remember seeing from the trip was a card my Dad sent to his mother to let her know he had made it to the Pacific Ocean. I’m not sure where the card ended up.

I treasure the pictures and this little bit of history about my father when he was an adventurous, young man.