Helen Fladwed has lived in a...

Helen Fladwed has lived in a list of towns that sounds like a conductor’s “all aboard”: Deadwood, Des Moines, Hollywood, Burbank, Chatsworth. The biggest challenge was getting from Iowa to California. Once in Los Angeles, Fladwed has been a coloratura soprano, wife and mother of two children, church volunteer, president of a PTA and a reluctant helper on the family chicken ranch. Fladwed, 84, lives in Chatsworth.

I was born in Deadwood, S.D., and my parents brought me to Des Moines when I was about 3 years old.

I came to California in 1927. My mother for many years had talked about coming to California; all Iowans wanted to come to California. It was the place where there didn’t seem to be any prejudice. There was spiritual freedom. It was more liberated socially. My husband and I moved in with my mother until we could get all the money together to make the trip. I was 22. My father came on ahead in ‘26, to get a job and place for us to live, so he was here.

We started out on the 5th of August in the heat of the day. We got here on the 27th. We had 22 days of problems.

None of us ever drove a car before. I’m talking about greenhorns, greeeenhorns! My mother bought a Case car, which was as big as these new Toyota vans. It was a second-hand car, six-passenger, eight-cylinder, all good tires, but the salesman didn’t say that there’s a difference between city driving and gravel driving. We began having all kinds of problems with the tires. In those days it was tube tires. So my brother and my husband, Jacob, were constantly patching. The tubes got to be very much crazy quilts of patches.

We got to Demming, N.M., and we had to stay over three days while they got a part for the car. The engine had gone wrong. We had to sleep outdoors because there was just a garage and a grocery store, that’s all. We had to wash in cold water, and there was the smell of gasoline. A lot of oil wells had come in. The gas smell was prevalent all over--miles and miles into nowhere and you could still smell it.

When we left Demming, we started out across this high desert. Our little fox terrier jumped out of the car before we realized it, and he ran wildly toward a herd of cattle, barking his head off. The cattle started to walk toward him. Mama says, “Stay right where you are now,” because we had read that wild cattle will attack anybody that’s on foot. And, of course, we were the only car. We were, all of this time, one lonesome car out there in that high desert. We were so green.

We sat in the car, and it began to get dark, and there was thunder and lightning, and we had the car windows open. Mom says, “Sit still, sit still. Don’t move.” And the lightning was playing all around the car, inside the car and out. By that time, the cattle had moved all around us. And lightning is attracted to the horns of cattle. There were actually lightning balls. It was a tremendous experience.

I never saw mama look at a map. I never saw a map, so I didn’t know where we were going. We were just going by guess and by golly, heading west.

Then we came to Yuma, Arizona. That was a big enough town to have an oil station, and they were having a grasshopper plague. You had to cover your face before you got a grasshopper in your mouth, it was that bad. And it was hot. We got some gasoline, and we were just praying that we’d get into California without anything more happening.

We finally got to Indio, and then that little old car just heaved a sigh of relief and says, “Well, I gotcha here. I’m done.” And all the tires went down and we were stranded. They just went flat.

I had started to California in style, wearing a beautiful purple taffeta dress and hat made to my specifications by a friend. By the time we got to Dennison, Tex., I was feeling the heat, so I discarded the purple taffeta outfit and went to the store and I bought man’s bib overalls that farmers wear. I made my debut in California in man’s overalls.