March 4, 1946
February 1946. World War II is over and wartime production jobs were ending. During the war, Carl and Georgie worked a number of jobs in several places, finishing the war in Pocatello, Idaho. They elected to return to Iowa, where they both had family, but opted to make a grand tour of the west on the way. Georgie wrote a journal of the trip. The story starts here.
Left Indio the next morning and drove across the desert to Desert Center where we stopped for gas and water. After we got in the desert, we gave up buying anti-freeze and drained the car every night as we spent the days cooking out our anti-freeze and at night it froze and we needed it.
Desert Center claims to have sun every day of the year and they have a standing offer of a free day’s lodging to anyone who comes on a day the sun doesn’t shine. Other than sunshine, we felt it had little to offer.
Drove to Blythe and stopped there so Carl could get a haircut. I tried to get my hair done but couldn’t get an appointment. Drove north to Vidal and Needles where we spent the night. Had more trouble than every getting a tourist camp but finally found a very ratty place on the edge of town, the poorest accommodations we had on the whole trip. It was apparently an old fruit stand that had been converted into a cabin and the proprietor must have been a native Californian as he ignored the fact the that it got real cold at night. The windows, which there were many, were covered with screen with cloth over that and we had to keep the gas heater on all night. To make things more interesting there was a sign on the wall to the effect the management could not be held responsible for asphyxiation by anyone leaving the heaters turned on all night. There were so many airholes, asphyxiation was practically impossible, but it was a little disconcerting. There were no outside lights and Carl took the garbage out and got about scared to death as he hit a cat on the head with the sack and it came boiling out of the garbage can right in his face.
Walt’s Comments
Mom never seemed to be much of a fan of the desert. Years later, when visiting my brother in Denver, she would complain about the arid nature and lack of vegetation.
Desert Center
Desert Center may not have seemed like much to Georgie and Carl, and there isn’t much there today.
During WW2, there was a Desert Training Center to train troops for the fighting in North Africa. The terrain was similar to that of North Africa. Much of the land was federally owned and very sparsely populated. The training center was run by Patton for the first few months after it was opened in March of 1942. It closed in 1944. There were multiple railroads that served the area. There were thirteen bases and four airfields that were used. They took advantage of an existing aqueduct for water.
That aqueduct has interesting history of its own. It was built in the 1930s to run from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. There was a lack of health care close to the work and Dr. Sidney R. Garfield decided to build a small hospital near the site. He had trouble getting paid for a number of reasons, not least of which it was deep in the Great Depression. A deal was struck to pay Dr. Garfield a set sum per day for each worker (5 cents taken from their pay, with an additional 5 cents if they had a family) and he was able to keep his Contractors General Hospital running.
He moved on to work with Henry J. Kaiser on the Grand Coulee Dam, covering some 6,500 workers and their families. When WW2 started, Kaiser asked Dr. Garfield to help manage the health of the workers at his Richmond Shipyards in San Francisco. After the war, the partnership continued, and the Permanente Health Care Plan was opened to the public. This was the beginning of Kaiser-Permanente.
Digging Deeper
This website has a lot about the Desert Training Center.
This page has information about the history of Kaiser-Permanente.
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