From Michigan to Arizona: A Family’s Journey West

In January 1944, as World War II continued overseas, a Michigan woman named Mabel Austin was up at three in the morning with her son Jerry. He could not breathe. Mabel had grown up on the Root family farm in Roxand Township, Michigan, and now stood alongside her husband Lawrence as the heart and backbone of the Eaton Rapids Holiness Camp Meeting grounds on the Grand River. One of their six children, ten-year-old Jerry, was losing his battle with asthma in the cold damp air of the Great Lakes. What followed was one family's decision to leave everything they had ever known and drive eighteen hundred miles into a desert they had never seen, on the faith of a doctor's suggestion. Lawrence and Mabel packed their six children into a 1939-1940 Chevy Special Deluxe pulling a freshly painted trailer, pointed themselves toward Route 66, and drove west through flat tires, frost on the tent in Oklahoma, a broken radiator hose on an Arizona mountain road, and two weeks of uncertainty toward a place none of them had ever been. Mabel wrote every word of it down. From Michigan to Arizona: A Family's Journey West is the complete 1944 diary of Mabel Fern Root Austin, preserved exactly as she wrote it, her spelling, her grammar, her punctuation, her voice, covering January 4 through October 19, 1944. Alongside the diary, author Rob Myers has woven in Mabel's own letters from the journey and the family's first weeks in Mesa, with historical annotations and an epilogue tracing where the road led for each of the six children. This is not a polished account. It is something far more precious, the unfiltered record of a woman's days as she actually lived them. Her worries are here. Her small victories, her exhaustion, her hope, her humor, and her love are all pressed between these lines like flowers saved from a garden that no longer exists. She got up before dawn. She wrote everything down. And without knowing it, she left us a gift.
ASIN: B0GZD464X2
VSKU: BVV.B0GZD464X2.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Myers, Robert D
Binding: Hardcover
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. All pages and cover are intact including the dust cover, if applicable . Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.