Note from David Marshall: This entry is from "Just a Country Boy," the original memoirs from my grandfather Carl E. Marshall that inspired us to co-write "The Book of Myself". He wrote it a couple years before he died in 1994 at the age of 91. I will be drawing upon "Just a Country Boy" for the "Later Years" entries in this online version of the book.
"How did we ever get into camping, or RV-ing? I always liked the outdoor life and by the early sixties had traveled many miles and seen a lot of our country. I had been to Washington, D.C, New York, Chicago, and many other cities. All of these trips were in conjunction with my career (statistics professor at Oklahoma State University), and paid for out of state and national funds. It was obvious I liked to travel - especially if someone else was paying the bills. My wife Gladys did some traveling, if it was paid for by someone else. We could never have paid for our travels ourselves in the early years.
"In the summer of 1960, Gladys went to visit our son in Germany. While there, he took a furlough from his chaplain post in the U.S. Army and decided to see part of the country with his mother and family. They couldn't afford to go first class, so they decided to rough it. They took a tent and sleeping and cooking equipment and many other essentials. The 'hit the road' and spent a month camping and seeing the sounds and sights of not only Germany but several adjoining countries as well. They had a ball. I had lived with Gladys for nearly forty years, and didn't know she liked to camp!
"By the time we retired we decided we had to try camping. I bought a Dodge truck and put on an eleven and a half foot slide-in and 'hit the road' a few days after I retired. Our first trip was to Colorado to a meeting and on to Casper, Wyoming, to visit my sister Fern. We later traded our slide-in for a fifth wheeler, and for the next twenty years we didn't look back.
"We have traveled and camped in every state of the Union, the southern provinces of Canada, and the northern states of Mexico. We belonged to three different traveling groups: ITTC standing for International Travel and Trailer Clubs, and two chapters of the Good Sam Clubs - the Chiefs centered in Tulsa and the local Cowboy Country Chapter of which we were charter members."
Carl E. Marshall, Ph.D., February 1992
