This is a view of the inside front cover of Dad’s photo album. The words “From” and “To” are neatly printed between the photos, indicating that the album was a gift from Aunt Diena Hulshof to Dad. I’ve been wondering whether Dad put these photos here after he received the album or Aunt Diena did before giving it to him.
You’ve seen the photo of Aunt Diena before.
Here is the photo of Lloyd standing by his 1924 Chevrolet coupe.
This photo was taken in the spring of 1929. He appears to be in front of his parents’ house in Jefferson. Dad left this car in Oregon during the roughly nine months he was in California (starting later the year the above photo was taken).
Here is the story of this car in Dad’s own words:
My first car was a 1924 Chev 490 coupe bought in 1928. It was driven till a man from California went through a stop sign coming off a bridge over the Willamette River onto Ellsworth Street in 1934 and hit the back wheel of my car and swung it around, turned it over, and made a pile of junk of it at the northwest corner of the intersection right by the Albany State Bank. How I was able to climb out of that pile of junk without a scratch I’ll never know. I wasn’t hurt a bit even though the body was in pieces around me. I was not near even being partly responsible. He went through the stop sign without stopping and I was so far through the intersection that he would have been responsible even though there was no stop sign. His sob story was that he was going to a funeral in Washington and would not have time to be delayed, so we didn’t call the police to hold him. It was a mistake. He was a liar. He lived fairly close to my brother Earl who was living there [i.e., in California] at the time. I got in touch with Earl and [he contacted the other driver, who] lied about all the details of the accident, so I never got a thing… I even had to clean up the mess [in the intersection]. Donna was on the way then, so we never got another car till after she was born. I will guess that it was about six months that we were without a car.
If you’re interested in the car, I believe a better view of it shows up on Harold’s photo album page.
Dad bought the car used, as he stated, but I was wondering how much a car like that cost new at that time. Not sure the below is exactly the same car, but it’s very close. $640 in 1924 dollars is about $9400 in 2019 purchasing power, so it was indeed “economical transportation” as the advertisement says—as long as you didn’t get hit by another car!