The Covered Wagon

I've been reading obituaries for decades, but until yesterday I never read one where it is mentioned that the subject's mother got to his place of birth by getting there with her parents in a covered wagon.

I've often wanted to meet or hear of someone whose parents, or grandparents got to where they lived by covered wagon. Perhaps it's because I rely on The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for my obituary reading—and while they are national papers—I believe an East Coast skewing emerges on how a deceased's ancestors travelled to where the deceased was born.

Usually, the ancestors either escaped Germany while they could before Hitler really took over, or they immigrated into the United States through Ellis Island, like my father's parents from Greece. My wife's father came through Ellis Island from Ireland, but not her mother. She came over first class from England, and as such, didn't have to pass through Ellis Island. Still an immigrant, however.

The obituary for the astronaut Thomas Stafford, 93, Who Led First U.S.-Soviet Space Mission in yesterday's NYT mentions that he was born in Weatherford, Oklahoma, west of Oklahoma City in 1930. His father was a dentist and his mother Mary Ellen (Patten) Stafford had moved to Oklahoma as a child in her family's covered wagon. The horse drawn Greyhound bus.

The obit doesn't say how old the mother was when she got to Oklahoma, other than she was a child, or what year she might have climbed down off that Conestoga Wagon, or when someone lifted her down and said "we're here." I wonder if kids in covered wagons bothered their folks to no end asking, "are we almost there yet" every bumpy half mile or so.

But imagine your Mom being able to tell you stories of how she and her parents got to Oklahoma in a covered wagon. The mind boggles; the head shakes.

Maybe it was because of 1950s television shows like Wagon Train that made me imagine when I was  a kid flying west with my folks for a visit to relatives and friends in Los Angeles and Chicago that made me look at the plane's floor and imagine that we were really flying to destinations that people had to use horses and covered wagons to get to. A little Twilight Zone crept in there as well.

I never got the chance to ask the parents of my daughter's now extended family that were at her wedding who were from the West Coast if any of their relatives got to the West Coast via a covered wagon. It's always fascinated me.

The astronaut Thomas Stafford surely graduated to a much faster mode of transportation in his life. He was a professional astronaut who flew into space four times, one time linking up with the Soviets in their two-man Soyuz spacecraft. As part of Apollo 10, he circled the moon scouting for landing locations for the Apollo 11 mission that saw Neil Armstrong be the first man to walk on the moon in July 1969.

There is a Stafford Air and Space Museum affiliated with the Smithsonian that has opened in his hometown of Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Thomas Stafford may not have been born in a covered wagon, but his mother could have told you about her missions in one.

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