In the early 1950's my grandmother made the wonderful choice of living in Ocean Park in Santa Monica, CA. As a result, I had the good fortune to travel west from my home in the Bronx, NY, to Los Angeles on two occasions during that decade. The first involved a magical trip in 1953 by railroad from New York to Los Angeles. My mother and I took the New York Central to Chicago where, I remember, it was so hot that we had to go to a movie theater to cool off and see "Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" while waiting to board the Santa Fe's El Capitan for the trip from Chicago to LA. For an 8-year-old, this was an adventure of extraordinary proportions. I can still recall one of the porters on the train gathering all the kids for stories of cowboys and Indians as we passed through the vistas of the old west. I didn't need Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers. For a brief moment in my childhood, I had the real thing.

A 1950's post card showing the Santa Fe's Super Chief traveling through orange groves in California

The logo of the Santa Fe's El Capitan. Three years after I took this train the Santa Fe added double decker cars to the El Capitan.

Below are a series of links to sites about and honoring the history of the Santa Fe:

 

Santa Fe Railroad Memorabilia

Santa Fe Historical and Modeling Society

A great deal of information about the Sante Fe

The Fred Harvey Hotels in New Mexico

Models of the Santa Fe El Capitan in 1956

The photo below is the only one that I have from the trip my mother and I took to Los Angeles in the summer of 1953. We took a Greyhound bus to San Diego and walked across into Tijuana, Mexico. This photo, taken by a photographer who obviously wasn't very knowledgeable about depth-of-field, was taken that day.

In 1955, we made a similar trip but this time by car. My father decided to drive his 1954 Chevy across the country. This trip required us, among other things, to cross the Mojave Desert in the summer with no air-conditioning. We stopped in Albuquerque, NM, to buy an air cooler at a Sears store on Central Avenue (Route 66). That it didn't really do anything except blow air was beside the point. At least it made us feel that we were cooler (along with my mother's cold wet towels that we put on our heads). Just outside of Albuquerque, in Tijeras Canyon, we stopped at a souvenir stand called "The Covered Wagon" which is shown in the first photo on this page. "The Covered Wagon" later was located in a central spot in the Old Town Plaza in Albuquerque, but sadly is now gone. When this picture was taken with my Kodak Brownie (identical to the camera in the photo at the top of the page), we had no way of knowing that in about 16 years, Albuquerque would become the home of my brother and his family, as well as my parents. Today, my family resides across the Southwest, from Houston, TX, to Albuquerque, NM, to Phoenix, AZ, to Los Angeles, CA.

One of the significant highlights of that special summer of 1955, was attending the opening day of Disneyland. By good fortune, I was there and you can see a little of what it looked like in the other photos below and on following pages.

Some time ago, I described these adventures to my good friend, Rick O'Leary, and in doing so I dubbed my childhood self "Little Roy." And so, here are some of the moments in the adventures of Little Roy captured for posterity.

The Covered Wagon, 1955

Entering Frontierland, 1955

Disneyland's African Jungle Ride,

Opening Day, July 1955

Entering the Magic Kingdom at Disneyland, Opening Day, July 1955

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Further photos from Little Roy's Adventures

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