The Grand Tour

July – August 1956, Part 2

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Note: These accounts are from my memory, with some help from my Grandmother’s notes she kept in a small tablet. My memory and her notes conflict slightly, and it is probably obvious which account is the most reliable.

Updates for Part 1: The 1956 Calgary Stampede ran from Monday, July 9 through Saturday 14th. According to my Grandmother’s note, first-day attendance was 97,000, and the cabin and room in the home out of Canmore, where we stayed the night before attending the Stampede on July 12, cost six dollars.

***

We did stay the night in Canada following our visit to the Stampede in Cochrane, out of Calgary. That cabin cost eighteen dollars. My memory says that we crossed into North Dakota, but my Grandmother’s notes say we stayed in Chester, Montana. There was a terrible electric storm with rain in sheets and hail. I remember the storm, and the owner’s wife was there alone. Her husband was out of town. She felt the motel sign should be turned off, but she was afraid to do it. Robert went down and turned the sign off for her. We tagged along to watch the danger.

The hotel with the rope fire escape and the soda water was in Williston, North Dakota. Most of eastern Montana and North Dakota was worthless country, in my opinion, but Grandma’s notes say good farming country.

From Williston, we traveled to Thief River Falls, where we rented a cabin for seven dollars. We spent most of the following day visiting Robert’s cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Tom Webster, somewhere in northern Minnesota. That visit was difficult. I couldn’t spend any time outside because the mosquitos would eat someone alive. It wasn’t much better in the house.

After that visit with the cousins, we stayed in a cabin by a lake. My main memory was of a gallon jar full of leeches on the drugstore counter.

“What are these things in this jar?” I asked the clerk.

“Those are leeches,” the clerk said. “We use them for sucking the blood out of bruises and things like that.”

My only knowledge about leeches came from Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. 

“My bruises heal just fine without any blood-sucking,” I said. There was no way they would ever put one of those things on me.

From Minnesota, we drove to the Devil’s Lake Region of Wisconsin. We had to go late into the night before finding any vacant cabins, and these were in Wisconsin Dells. We had to take two cabins at six dollars each and with no kitchen. I remember lunch in a park in Wisconsin Rapids. After lunch, we headed for Chicago.

Coming into Chicago, at one of the first stop lights, a couple of young African American guys pulled up alongside us in an old Model A Ford. They laughed and gunned the motor. Robert was quick to respond, and when the light turned green, we were off like a shot.

The Model A caught us at the next light, and everyone laughed. This went on for three or four lights.

“Robert, you stop this,” Lila said. “You are going to get those boys in trouble.”

That was probably my first exposure to any thought that those boys would be in any more trouble than Robert. Coming from southwest Oregon, my exposure to anything racial was meniscal. But Robert gave the guys a salute and a laugh, and they took off ahead of us.

We drove past the chapel where Uncle Ernie and Linnea were married. It was a small chapel under a new overpass, not far from Lake Michigan. We had a double cabin on the far side of Chicago for $9.00 but no kitchen.

After Chicago, we headed east. Our distention was Ithaca, NY, where my oldest cousin and his young family lived. Ken Haughton was in a Ph.D. program at Cornell.

Going through Ohio, Phillip seemed to sleep in the back seat a lot. The countryside was flat and unremarkable to us Oregon boys, and he woke up when we stopped for gas.

“Ohio is all city,” Phillip said. 

Lilia corrected him, saying he slept through the farm country.

We drove along Lake Erie, staying in Wickliffe, Ohio, on the east side of Cleveland. The following morning we were up early and visited Niagara Falls. 

I wanted to take a boat ride out under the falls, but I had to settle for scrambling on the rocks near the bottom of the falls. The heavy mist created by the falls. I was impressed with the grandeur of the falls.

After leaving the Falls, we arrived at Ken’s at about 7:00 pm. They were living in an apartment complex, which we found quickly, but finding their apartment took a little luck. We spotted their oldest son, Kelly, riding his peddle car on a sidewalk in the complex. Phillip and I were dispatched to catch him.

“Kelly, we are your cousins from Oregon,” I said. “Take us to your house.”

Kelly was about four, and I had never seen him before, but he took us home. We spent a couple of days in Ithaca, staying in a motel not far from Ken’s. The motel cabins were fourteen dollars a day, a significant increase from the usual six dollars in the West. We had a couple of big electric storms with heavy rain there.

From Ithaca, we headed to New York City. We stayed one night in Dover, NY, and then entered NYC relatively early in the day. We had rooms in the Statler Hilton Hotel. My memory says we were on the thirtieth floor, but looking online now, I think the hotel only had fifteen floors.

There was no air conditioning, and I found that if you leaned out the window, and spit, the spit would fall for six or eight floors before being sucked into an open window below. That was entertaining for a time.

We took a bus tour of the city. My Grandmother’s notes say we “took a tour trip around the town. Saw lots of landmarks, such as The Little Church around the corner, then across to the Statue of Liberty. Then back to the UN building and the Rockefeller building. We had our supper in this place.”

My best memories of the tour were the whole plucked chickens hanging in the window of a meat shop, heads, feet, and all. A bum passed out on a doorstep with a bottle of whiskey tucked under his belly and climbing up to the head of the Statue of Liberty.

The next day, we went up to the top of the Empire State Building for twelve dollars and fifty-seven cents plus tax. It took three different elevators to get up the hundred and ten floors, and it was quite a view.

After the Empire State Building, we headed south out of town and stayed in New Castle, Delaware. When we stopped for gas in Delaware, there was quite a discussion when Grandma and Lila returned to the car after using the lady’s room. They had encountered a Bidet in the lady’s room. A bidet was difficult to figure out for a couple of ladies, not far removed from the outhouse days. Robert said it must be to just stand over a pee. I am sure they didn’t have it figured out then.

From Delaware, we continued south, turning west at the corner of Georgia. That will be covered in Part 3.

The Grand Tour – July – August  1956, Part 1 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

There were several events that strung together in 1956 that had a significant impact on my life.

“If you are coming with me to Aunt Lila’s, you had better get in gear,” Mom said as I was finishing up my breakfast. Bacon was somewhat of a luxury for us, and I savored every bite.

I finished eating and took my plate to the kitchen. As was expected, it was clean as a whistle. I could always hear Dad’s voice in my head as I ate.

“You clean your plate! We don’t waste any food when there are kids in China who are starving.” Dad would always say.

I ran upstairs to get dressed. Today, Uncle Robert said we could go up the hill with him to watch the logging. Logging was a big part of our lives in western Oregon. Dad, and most of the other fathers in Broadbent, worked in the woods. We always heard stories but seldom had a chance to actually see the sites where they worked.

The drive to the Ochletrees was not far, and Robert was waiting at the jeep when we pulled into the driveway.

The jeep was crowded when everyone was loaded. Robert drove with a friend of his in the passenger seat. Mom and I shared one side seat, unpadded, and Aunt Lila and Phillip shared the other. We pulled out of the driveway and onto the logging road up Endicott Creek.

We drove several miles up the creek before coming to the logging site.

“We will have some extra money when this is done,” Robert said. “Stumpage is forty dollars a thousand, and there are several hundred thousand board feet on this hillside.”

A lot was going on, but it was all cat-logging. I had hoped to see a donkey working. That was what Dad did in the woods. He was a donkey puncher.

***

“You need to hurry, David. Our appointment is in a half hour,” Mom said. “We are meeting Grandma and Grandpa at the hospital, and you and Phillip are getting your polio shots.”

“I don’t know why I have to get a shot in the summer,” I said.

Uncle Ern’s son, Ross, died from polio,” Mom said. “Grandpa says that if you and Phillip are going on this big trip this summer, you will get this new vaccine.”

Mom and I jumped in the car and drove to the Mast Hospital in Myrtle Point. Aunt Lila, Phillip, Grandma, and Grandpa were waiting for us when we arrived in the waiting room.

The nurse took us back to a small room that smelled like alcohol. She had the needles laid out already.

“They had some problems with this vaccine last year. Have they fixed that now?” Mom asked the nurse.

“Yes, that was with one batch of vaccine from one manufacture,” the nurse said. “That has been fixed. This vaccine is fine. We have been using it for several months now.”

With that, I rolled up my sleeve and looked out the window as the nurse swabbed my arm and poked me with the needle. 

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, David. You were pretty brave,” Grandma said.

“They will need a booster dose in three or four weeks,” the nurse said.

“That’s good. That way, they will have their booster a couple of weeks before our trip,” Aunt Lila said.

“What kind of a trip are you taking?” the nurse asked.

“We are going to go up to the Calgary Stampede and then on back to New York, down to Mississippi, and then home through our daughter’s homes in California,” Grandma said.

“Oh my! That is quite a trip,” the nurse said.

***

Departure day finally came on July 8, 1956. We all piled into Uncle Robert’s 1954 Cadillac. Robert is driving, Grandpa Davenport is in the passenger seat, and Aunt Lila and Grandma are in the back seat. It was decided that my cousin Phillip and I would trade off, riding in the middle, one day in the front, and then one day in the back. That was the seating for the entire trip.

The first day was a short trip to Cottage Grove to stay with Uncle Ernie and his family the first night. They lived next to the drive-in movie theater.

“You and Eric can climb over the fence and turn up the volume on some of those speakers so we can watch the movie tonight,” Ernie said.

Everyone sat in lawn chairs in the backyard and watched the movie that night. We were up pretty early and hit the road. 

This was an entirely new adventure for me. At that time in my eleven years, I had rarely been out of Coos County, Oregon. Only a few trips to visit family from Fortuna, California, in the south to Cloverdale, Oregon, in the north. The largest towns I had been in were Eureka, California, and Coos Bay, Oregon.

We traveled over the McKenzie Pass and encountered red pavement where they were using volcanic rock in the pavement. After lunch in Madras, we settled into a motel at Boardman.

The motel was a series of small cabins in a gulch overlooking the Columbia River. To me, it looked like a worthless river, with no bank access and far too large fish with a willow pole. Phillip and I experienced our first night of sleeping on the floor. That was to be our typical situation for the entire trip. I can only remember a night or two when I had a bed. 

From Boardman, we went to Sandpoint, Idaho, stopping at McNary dam along the way. And there was an eleven-mile trip down the hill into Lewiston, Idaho. The shingled cabin must have been only a few feet from the railroad track.

“That train kept us awake half the night,” Robert told the owner when we were loading the car.

“A lot of people complain about it, but you know, we have lived here since the war, and I never hear the train at night,” the owner said.

From Sandpoint, we went to Calgary with a stop in the mountains to visit Lake Louise. When we came out of the mountains, some thirty miles from Calgary, traffic came to a stop, and we finally pulled into a motel.

“You aren’t going to find any motels with a vacancy from here to Calgary,” the owner said. “I know of a hunting lodge back in the mountains, not too far from here. They probably have cabins this time of the year.”

So off we went to the hunting lodge. It was located at the end of a long road, and I don’t know the elevation, but in the second week of July, it was nearly freezing when we arrived. We had a nice cabin, and Phillip and I even had a bed, and Grandma and Grandpa had a separate room in the main house. The only downside was the bathroom was in a separate building, and it was just one notch above an outhouse. There was a long trough for a urinal, and on the trip before bedtime, there was ice in the urinal.

The good thing was the lodge was happy for the business in their slow time and served a late dinner of soup with bread, and the breakfast they put together was one of the best of the entire trip. All the pancakes you could eat.

We were on the road to Calgary early. The traffic was heavy but moving. We parked in a massive parking lot and walked to the stampede grounds. I was an old hand at the Coos County Fair. The carnival associated with the rodeo was larger than I had ever seen. I was limited in the money I had in my pocket, so I visited a couple of sideshows but never did any rides.

The stampede rodeo was larger than any rodeo I had seen before. The grandstands were packed. On one trip to the bathroom, I had some lemon-lime soda spilled on my back by some old guy with too many drinks in his hands.

When the rodeo was over, we toured the beef barns briefly. We stayed in Canada one more night and then headed for Montana. 

We stopped at the first small town we encountered. We stayed at an old hotel with a knotted rope for a fire escape. That would be no problem for me, but I’m not sure Grandma could make it down the rope. Phillip and I were allowed to climb down the rope several times.

The other thing about this little town was soda in the water, and it was mostly undrinkable. I know because I drank a glass and I was sick all night.

Since we arrived late, the hotel served us soup and bread for dinner. We went to bed early so we could get up and on the road. It would take us a couple of days to make it to Minnesota. Robert had cousins in Minnesota that we were going to visit. 

Aunt Lila gave me a dose of Pepto Bismol before bed. I hated the stuff. Dad always wanted me to take some when I complained of a stomach ache. But this time, I took it because that water had done a number on my stomach.

Photo by D. E. Larsen, DVM, Booklet from Amy Davenport.

PeeWee, from the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was early Sunday morning when the phone rang. We were not out of bed yet. We didn’t have any firm plans for the day, but we had discussed going up the Calapooia River to swim. The weather had been warm and dry, and we wanted to take advantage of the river while it was still running full and clear.

“Good morning, Doc, This is Oscar. I hope I didn’t wake you up, but I wanted to catch you before you headed to go fishing or something. I bought this little wiener dog the other day. Cute little guy, he is about 6 weeks old. I fed him a pork chop bone last night. Boy did he like that, he attacked that bone like it was alive. But Doc, this morning, he ain’t feeling too good. In fact, he is pretty darn uncomfortable. I think maybe that bone got stuck.”

“Good morning, Oscar, we were just laying here thinking we didn’t have a thing to do on this beautiful Sunday morning.”

Otto had been in the clinic a few times. Oscar was a large man, with broad shoulders and a muscular build, white hair that he wore in a crewcut. He was gruff to most people but well-liked by everyone. I could picture this massive man with large rough and calloused hands carrying a little 6-week old Dachshund puppy into the clinic. I always found it odd when big men selected small dogs, but it seemed pretty typical.

“I know Doc, it is a nice morning. I suppose you have kids wanting to go swimming or something. But Doc, I’m afraid this little guy won’t wait till Monday morning.” 

“Okay, Oscar, I will meet you at the clinic in an hour,” I said. “That will give me enough time to get up and dressed and help with breakfast for the kids.”

Oscar was waiting at the door when I pulled up to the front of the clinic. He had the little pup tucked in the crook of his arm. If you didn’t look close, you would miss him. Oscar followed me through the door, and we went right to the exam room. 

It was apparent the little guy was in distress. He stood on the table, trying not to move, with his head and neck extended.

“I call him PeeWee,” Oscar said. “I am not sure why we got him, but he is a cute little guy, and he really likes me.”

PeeWee’s exam was unremarkable except for his discomfort. I had not been in practice too many years, but I had already learned the bone in the throat presentation was never a bone in the throat.

“How big was this pork chop bone, Oscar?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know, it wasn’t too big, maybe the size of my thumb,” Oscar replied.

Oscar’s hands were massive. The size of his thumb would make two of most other men.

“Are you sure he swallowed it?” I asked.

“He was sure chewing on it. And I looked everywhere, under the kitchen table and everywhere. It was nowhere to be found.”

“Will, let’s take an x-ray and see if it is in his stomach,” I said. “It could have just scratched up his gullet going down.”

I took PeeWee back to the x-ray room. Getting an x-ray on Sunday morning was no problem. The problem was waiting for the developer to warm up so it could be developed.

PeeWee was uncomfortable enough that he laid on the x-ray table without any restraint. I quickly snapped two views for the chest and abdomen. One lateral with him on is side and ventral-dorsal with him on his back.

Oscar and I chatted a little as we waited for the developer to reach a temperature that would be functional. I had watched Oscar at the bowling ally, often wondering if they had needed special bits to drill the holes in his bowling ball. 

When the x-ray was finally on the viewer, my heart sank. There it was, a massive bone compared to the small chest of a six-week-old Dachshund, lodged in his esophagus right at the base of the heart. I was unsure that it could be removed by an endoscope. Endoscopes were new things in veterinary medicine in those years. It would mean a referral to a specialty clinic to even have someone try to remove it. And in the 1970s, that meant a trip to a teaching hospital either in Davis California or Pullman Washington.

“Oscar, this is a bad as it can be,” I explained. “This bone is lodged at the base of the heart, right in the middle of his chest. The best way to get it out is to go to a veterinary teaching hospital and see if they can remove it.”

“Doc, that isn’t going to happen,” Oscar said. “I am setting here wonder how the hell I am going to pay you, there is no way I can go somewhere else. It is going to be fixed here, or we will just have to put the poor little guy to sleep.”

In the few years I had been in Sweet Home, I had learned that price was often a limiting factor to medical decisions. If you could fix it for a hundred dollars, that was fine. If it was going to be more, then there was a serious discussion of putting the critter to sleep.

“The only way I can get that bone out of this pup is with surgery,” I said. “That means opening his chest and opening his esophagus to remove the bone. The book says not to do that if you can avoid it, and it is a surgery that will be very difficult for me with one pair of hands. By very difficult, I mean it is over my head in this clinic. We could lose PeeWee in surgery or after surgery.”

“Doc, if there is a chance you can fix him, go for it,” Oscar said as he stood up, towering over me.

“I don’t know what it will have to cost, Oscar,” I said. “You could be paying several hundred dollars for a dead dog.”

“You do what you can, I will just have to come up with the money,” Oscar said. “Do you want me to sign something?”

“Your handshake is good enough for me,” I said, extending my hand as I gathered PeeWee in my left arm. Oscar’s hand engulfed mine, but I shook as firmly as I could. “I will do this today and give you a call when we are out of surgery. He is going to have to stay overnight, maybe two or three nights.”

I gave Sandy a call, telling her I was going to need a hand with surgery. That meant that the kids would have to entertain themselves at the clinic, hopefully, not for the entire day.

While I was waiting for Sandy, I began setting up for surgery. Any thoracotomy for me was major surgery. I was thankful that I had the foresight when I made my equipment purchase to include a ventilator. The problem with that was the size of this patient. I was worried I would have trouble setting the volume of the breath low enough to accommodate this little guy. 

When we got going, the first part of things was pretty standard. I induced anesthesia with Pentathol and then placed an endotracheal tube. With gas anesthesia, I ran a high flow semi-open system that was sort of autopilot. That changed when the chest was opened.

I prepped the left side of the chest and did a local block at the fifth intercostal space using lidocaine. 

Then with a deep breath and a glance at Sandy, I made my incision. When I opened the chest, we started the ventilator. It worked great, and Sandy could pause it as I needed. I turned off the Halothane to prevent getting the pup too deep in anesthesia. I would turn it back on only as needed.

Moving as quickly as I could, I spread the ribs with a retractor and pushed the lung lobes aside. There was the bulge of the bone in the esophagus. I dissected to the esophagus between the Vagus and the Phrenic nerves. Then carefully packed off the area with moist sponges. I incised the esophagus longitudinally, using as short of an incision as I could. I grasped the bone with forceps, and it slipped out, expanding the small incision only slightly. 

I used a two-layer closure of the esophagus with 3-0 Maxon. Being careful to ensure the endothelial layer was securely closed. I place a couple of sutures in the soft tissues between the nerves and then removed the packing. Then we carefully inflated the collapsed lung lobes.

I placed a chest drain and used a Heimlich flutter value on the drain tube. Then I closed the chest by pulling the ribs together with two sutures of 2-0 Maxon encircling the ribs on each side of the incision. When I closed the soft tissues between the ribs, it sealed the chest.

We overinflated the lungs to help evacuate the residual air from the chest. Closed the skin and secured the flutter valve to the chest wall. This valve was nearly as long as the chest. It was definitely not designed for a 6-week-old Dachshund puppy. It sort of looked like a muffler on PeeWee’s side.

After a small dose of Innovar for pain, we woke up PeeWee. Waiting as long as we could before removing the endotracheal tube, just in case we had some respiratory issues. I think PeeWee felt so good with that bone out of his esophagus that he was not bothered by the pain of the chest incision.

PeeWee’s recovery was remarkable. He was bouncing around, looking for breakfast in the morning. I think he was disappointed with his liquid diet. By the end of the day on Monday, I was able to pull his chest tube, and we sent him home. Strict liquid diet for a week, and then it depended on the recheck. 

Oscar was a happy man when he picked him up. I cautioned him again about not feeding bones and to be strict on the liquid diet. He pulled out three hundred dollar bills from his pocket and pressed them into my hand. Never asking what the bill was going to be, he shook my hand vigorously and walked out the door with PeeWee licking his face. I was happy with the three hundred dollars.  

Photo by Dominika Roseclay on Pexels