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Tracing a T to Tampa Again: |
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The path of this trip is based on letters my great-grandmother wrote and sent home as they traveled. I don't believe that I ever saw Granny's original letters although I now know that a cousin has them safely tucked away. Sometime before the mid-seventies, my grandmother laboriously transcribed them with a typewriter and that is what I started with. There are numerous spelling and punctuation errors throughout the letters. For example, there is not a single apostrophe. Whether this was normal for the time, a quirk of Granny's, or the result of Grandma's struggle with the typewriter I do not know. Similarly, I can only guess at the source of particular spellings. Daytona appears as Datona and Datonia as well as Daytona; Rabbit often appears with one 'b'. I have resisted the temptation to correct these in the posted versions. In addition to the "grammatical" errors, there are words to which the euphemism "politically incorrect" is readily applied. Granny talks of darkeys and niggers and the temptation to "correct" these was even greater than for the misspellings. Not doing so forces me to acknowledge that, unlike the spelling and punctuation, these were not accidents. In 2001, I stated that "Granny was no racist" then preceded to prove otherwise by pointing out that "these words were as natural to her as calling their automobile the machine." Western Ohio was, and to some degree is, like that. A childhood friend recently observed that we had been raised as racists then added a Monty Pythonesque "I got better". Granny wasn't hateful or looking to hurt people but I don't doubt that she believed that non-whites were somehow inferior. I can't change the past but maybe I can get better. For the 2001 trip, each daily journal page presented an excerpt that covered the area of the day's travel in a text block. I had envisioned doing the same thing in 2020 but I talked myself out of it. As I reacquainted myself with what was done in 2001, I noted that the difference between 1920 and 2001 travel speeds and the fact that I sometimes combined multiple 1920 visits to a spot into a single modern day pass resulted into some rather long and imprecise excerpts. The possibility of anyone actually reading an entire excerpt through the relatively small text block seemed unlikely. For this trip, instead of the excepts, I'm providing a link on each daily page that leads to the point where that day starts in a HTML version of the letters. That version as well as a PDF version can be access through the links below. |
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