SUMMERS COUNTY W.Va. (Hinton News) – As I sit here reminiscing on this Christmas night, thinking about all of the many family stories I have been told over the years, and trust me, it has been a lot! I started remembering something my Grandfather, Bernard Thompson, told me from his younger years.
About 1952 or so he and his best friend John Kesler, two Summers County boys, decided to embark on a road trip. Automobiles had only been readily accessible by the mass population for 30 years or so. It was a great haul for a local to have been out of West Virginia at that point in time, much less down south.
And that is just what they did, they set out from Talcott, West Virginia to the Florida Keys. I can’t remember what automobile he had at the time, but as much as my grandfather traded around, it was somewhere around a 1949 to 1950 model and definitely a Ford. Granddad..I won’t call him cheap, but let’s say he was very frugal.
On the ride down, they slept in the car to save money and made very few tourist stops. I do recall him saying they went exploring under a bridge in the Keys and got so eaten up by mosquitoes they were miserable for days. They did stop at one restaurant, as you can see by this photo from the trip, Jim’s Bar-B-Cue.
The only souvenir he bought while on this adventure was this license plate topper from Florida. Of course, it was something car-related. He put it on his car when he returned, just to get the attention from people stopping to ask him questions like, “Did you get that in Florida?” If you knew my grandfather, you knew he loved attention and would do anything to get it.
