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"During the winter Pa started what I think was a long-range program of propaganda to get me to come home again.... He said it had been so tough that winter that he would have to sell out if I didn't come back in the spring. Twila and I started to lay plans to go back to Minnesota and I wrote to Pa and told him I would be coming back in the spring. [38.214-3] "We started winding things up so we could leave for Minnesota the first part of April. Howard, Twila, and I worked right up to the day we left. Twila and I told a few people, including Howard, that we had gotten married in February. I wrote home and said we were married and she was coming along, just as we were leaving, too late to get a reply back." [38.218-4] "Howard and I wrote checks for $125 each, the amount we had left in our checking accounts. If we hadn't had the foresight to leave some money in the bank to come back on, we would have been stuck in California a long time, at the pay we were getting. Marj sold Pa the Plymouth so we could drive it back." [38.219-1] "Twila wrote home and told her Ma. Her Ma put the letter up in the cupboard and didn't tell anybody, not even her own kids. She must have thought it was a bad dream that would go away. Instead of the rousing welcome we half expected in Kanosh, we got blank looks from everybody. Twila's mother hadn't mentioned her letter to anyone and she and Marie weren't even at home." [38.218-7] "Out in the mountains of Wyoming we got into a blizzard in the dark and sometimes could drive only by opening a window on each side and watching the road shoulders. I followed one shoulder around a corner onto a side road and Twila almost had heart failure. She thought I had turned into the ditch." "When we got to Laramie at 4 a.m. they stopped us and said we couldn't go up over the pass to Cheyenne until daylight. We sat in the depot until daylight. Sometimes the only way we could follow the highway was by driving half way between the power and telegraph poles on either side of the roadway." [38.221-3] "In Nebraska we drove through an unbelievable dust storm across a lot of the state. You couldn't see much past the car radiator. When two cars met, driving with their lights on bright, one would stop ... and the other would creep past." [38.221-5] "When we got to Fremont, Nebraska, it was raining and we stopped at a motel for the night. We made Sioux City, Iowa, the next day and caught up to a snowplow. All the roads ahead of it were blocked. We made it to a motel...." "The roads had been plowed by noon the next day; then, up by Canby, Minnesota, we caught up to a snowplow again. They said as far as they knew the road was still blocked ahead, clear to Canada. A highway patrolman came up behind us and said we could get out of the snow by turning back and swinging east to Marshall. We followed his advice, came up through Glenwood on good roads and got home, after dropping Howard off, about 11 p.m." [38.222-2] "On the trip out to California in the fall, the weather had been perfect the whole way. When we got to Ashby on April 18, the weather had been almost one steady nightmare." [38.222-7] "The house was dark and we didn't know what the reaction to my letter had been, so we hardly dared go in. But Ma and Pa both got up. I suppose they were really curious to see what I had picked up in Hollywood, and they couldn't have been nicer. They even gave us something to eat." [38.222- 6]
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