Introduction

On Monday, July 17, 1967, my parents and I departed Carrollton, Texas for Los Angeles, California. I had just turned five years old that month. My father had just turned 29 and my mother was days away from turning 26. We were moving to Los Angeles due to my father's temporary work assignment with the Texas State Board of Insurance, which lasted about eight months. Although I was only five I do remember being excited about the upcoming move, likely asking "Are we there yet?" whenever Mom and I traveled with my dad on his short business trips to nearby towns in Texas during the weeks before we moved. I even wrote a note to my grandmother ("Nana") in June asking her to go to Disneyland with us.

I remember living in California in a general sense, with some memories of particular places or events much stronger than others. Fortunately I have several things in my possession to help jog my memory and fill in the details regarding what happened and when, specifically:

An album of Polaroid photos with my mother's handwritten notes for each one

A collection of items such as brochures and tickets from many of the tourist attractions we visited

A large binder containing records of my father's work history (W-2 forms, pay stubs and expense reports) starting when he was bagging groceries around the age of 14 through all but his last five years with the Texas State Board of Insurance

A diary my mother started the day we left Texas

All 54 letters my mother wrote to her mother (and younger brother) while we were living in Los Angeles

I have read only a handful of those letters and diary entries over the years, so I decided the 50-year anniversary of the beginning of our trip would be a good time to start going through them chronologically, one day at a time, as they happened. This blog will chronicle both my family's journey to Los Angeles and my reliving it as I go through the physical memorabilia of that trip. I plan on writing one post for each day that had either a diary entry or a postmarked letter.

Sadly, I am unable to relive these memories with either of my parents, as my father died in 1991 and my mother died in 2015. This would certainly be a different experience if either of them were still alive.

I really have no idea what we're going to find, but there should be something for everyone, whether you want to see what I was like as a five-year-old brat, or what my parents, Los Angeles or the world were like in the late 1960s. It should be an interesting insight into the world half a century ago and how a 20-something married couple, who grew up in separate Texas towns (Denton and Belton) with a combined population of 27,500 in 1950, adjusted to life in a city of over 2.5 million in 1967.