Stories
The story of
the Stevenson family
The summer vacation was the center of our family life. Beginning in 1948 and every summer while I was growing up we would pile in the family car and go for two or three weeks to some exotic destination:
1948-Noel in the Ozarks (see photo)
1949-Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park
1951-Cape Cod and Camp Bonnie Dune
1950-Ohio and Mother's family ?
1952-California, including Antelope Valley
1953-California (I was already working there in Antelope Valley)
1954-Cape Cod and Camp Bonnie Dune
1955-Ohio (I went on from there by train to work at Camp Bonnie Dune)
1956-Cape Cod (I was already working there)
With Connie and Jim and the old English Ford on our way to Colorado in 1949
During the intervening year between vacations, we would beg father to get out the slide projector in the evening and show us the many slides he had taken from our vacations so that we could relive them again.
Not long ago Lindsay and I revisited the little campground along the Elk River near Noel where we vacationed in 1948, and it has hardly changed. The beautiful landscape of the Ozarks with its limestone bluffs and clear streams is still very attractive. I have seen only one other region like this, the Dordogne region of France which is the cradle of our species (both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon and their wonderful cave paintings).
In Colorado in 1949 we had a little log cabin on the banks of the headwaters of the Colorado River so small that we could even wade across as small children. At the Ranger Headquarters, I bought my first big book, a field guide to plants and animals, which I still have, and which sparked my life-long interest in biology.
The vacations toward the East usually included (or consisted of) trips to Plymouth and Yellow Springs, Ohio, to visit my grandmother, my mother's brother and sister and our cousins.
The destinations of the vacations to Cape Cod and California were influenced by my father's experiences. On Cape Cod, we rented a cabin in Camp Bonnie Dune (South Yarmouth) from its owner Dwight Rogers. My father had been a camper and then a counsellor there when it was a summer boys' camp in the 1920's. With the death of his own father, he had taken on Dwight as a kind of big brother/father figure which helped him grow up. Although the boys' camp had been closed for many years, Dwight maintained the cabins for summer visitors, and I would later work as his assistant for three summers. My brother Jim would do the same a few years later.
In California we visited my father's first wife Marian and her husband Lou Koenig. Lou was an especially colorful character, who had been a truck driver and then the owner of trucking companies, and now the owner of a ranch in the desert of Antelope Valley using deep-well water to irrigate. In 1953, I went out to be an irrigator on the ranch (see Farmer Dave.
After we children grew up and they moved to Massachusetts, my parents asked Jim, Connie and I to help them decide what to do with their resources. Should they save them and try to leave us a little inheritance or should they spend their funds on travel? Of course we said the latter, and so they traveled widely both in the US and abroad (Switzerland, New Zealand, England, etc.), providing a model to the rest of us on how to enjoy and enrich our lives. One of the things they bequeathed to us was the many diaries, photos and slides from their travels, as well as those from our family vacations.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of the Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme