At Home On the Road

W hen the Pattersons of Pacific Palisades embarked on a 7,500-mile round-trip journey across the United States in the summer of 1951, the local newspaper announced the family’s departure: “Pattersons Leave on First Trip in Unique Private Bus.” Martha Patterson’s husband, Pat, might have challenged that headline, arguing that what they were driving was not actually a bus. It was an early motor home’a 33-ft.-long, 8-ft-wide vehicle called a Flxible that they had converted into a house car for family travel. Martha, who holds the distinction of having lived in the Palisades the longest of any current resident, tells the story of her family’s adventure as pioneering motor homers in a new book, “It Isn’t A Bus,” written with her daughter, Sally Patterson Tubach. The authors will sign their self-published book at a party at Martha’s home on July 3. For more information, call (213) 447-5188 or e-mail lauraepatterson@yahoo.com. “It Isn’t A Bus” details the two-month trip that Martha and Pat took with their three young children, Charles, 12, Dave, 9, and Sally, 5. Told in Martha’s warm and honest tone, with a good dose of humor, the story takes readers on a bumpy but joyous ride across the country and introduces them to a host of quirky characters from a female hitchhiker to vacationing school teachers driving a hearse. “My mother’s account of our family’s adventure has allowed me to see my five-year-old self, my older brothers and my engineer father through her eyes,” Tubach writes in the foreword. “Based on her journal of this trip and her letters home, her story conjures up an America that was more innocent and less regulated and in which husbands and wives rarely questioned their roles. People were not afraid to invite strangers into the private space, and no one thought twice about powering large vehicles with abundant fossil fuels’except for my dad. He thought about the future and created a hybrid house car that could run on both gasoline and butane gas, because the latter ran cleaner and cheaper in our bus’ powerful Buick engine.” Motor homing, before it was called that, was Pat’s idea. “He had a wild imagination,” says Martha, who married Charles Patterson (Pat) in 1938. It had been Pat’s idea to elope and marry in Las Vegas, which Martha agreed to because “I was so much in love with Pat.” She admits, “I was so uneasy going off with a young man I wasn’t married to. You know, it wasn’t done in those days. That’s what made me nervous, and I thought I’d ruin my reputation with all my Pacific Palisades friends to do something like that.” Martha didn’t ruin her reputation in town. After they were married, the Pattersons bought two lots on Via de la Paz, next to the original home of Dr. Charles Scott, founder of the Palisades, and near Martha’s family’s original home on Swarthmore. Pat, who worked as a mechanical engineer for North American, had a passion for cars and, over the years, acquired quite a collection of automobiles and airplane parts that the Pattersons stored on their Potrero Canyon property, which extended from La Cruz almost to PCH. When they purchased the canyon in 1949, it was being used as a landfill and was known as the “town dump.” One of the familiar sites on the property was a cigar-shaped aluminum “bomber” made from two cockpit sections of World War II Martin B-26 Marauder bombers that Pat had bolted together. Pat had wanted to turn the bomber into a travel home but, fortunately for Martha, before he had the chance to do that, he discovered a small school bus in a junkyard in East Los Angeles. The 1933 vintage model Utility Coach served as the Pattersons’ first family house car for a trip they took to Apple Valley (at the edge of the Mojave Desert) in 1948. They affectionately called it the Bouse’a combination of bus and house. Pat had aspirations to take their children on a longer, educational cross-country trip. He himself had come west from Iowa on a motorcycle in 1934, during the Great Depression. M artha, too, had journeyed to California from the Midwest, traveling with her family, the Frenches, from Ohio in their Jeffrey Touring Car in the summer of 1921. She was only six years old at the time, and it took them 26 days to make the trip, camping along the way, often with other migrating families. They settled in the Palisades in early 1925. It would be about 25 years before Martha would again embark on a journey across the country’and back’this time, with her own family. The Pattersons’ vehicle of choice was a used red and white Flxible bus that they converted into a home on wheels. Flxible buses were built in Loudonville, Ohio, and carried passengers between the LAX and downtown Los Angeles in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Pat found a damaged one that needed its engine rebuilt, and a salesman agreed to sell it to him with the necessary parts but without the tires, for $1,500. Martha writes in her book: “During the nine months we worked on it in our spare time, evenings and weekends, we discovered to our chagrin that a modern, 1945-model, cross-country bus was a far cry mechanically and financially from a Model A Ford.” While Pat worked on the mechanics of converting the bus into a traveling home, Martha was in charge of the interior design, of making it feel homey inside. “I thought it would be good policy to have a different design on each pair of sheets because we all had to have single beds,” says Martha, who sewed patterned sheets for her family’s beds, plaid slipcovers for the four passenger seats behind the driver’s seat, and ruffled yellow and black floral-print curtains for the driver’s window. Pat had constructed bunk-bed frames along the sides of the bus where they slept, except for Sally, whose bunk was suspended by chains from the overhead baggage rack. Martha found a large National Geographic map of the country and shellacked it over their masonite dining table, which folded out from the wall. “We could sit at that table and eat, and we could also sit at that table and plot our next day’s journey, and see where we were headed and how much progress we had made,” she says. “It was real cozy in the bus.” ”The Pattersons set off in the summer of 1951 in their “Flexie,” which they also called “the Monster,” “the Thing” and “the Bouse.” They headed to Las Vegas and traveled through Arizona and New Mexico before heading up through the Midwest to New York, and then taking the northern route home, dipping into Colorado and Utah for the last leg of their journey. Pat’s ingenuity and Martha’s faith in Pat were tested many times throughout their journey, the first time at the beginning of the trip when Martha was driving and the clutch housing exploded. They had to spend 11 hot days on the Hualapai Indian Reservation in the Arizona desert while they waited for the clutch parts from Ohio to arrive. “It was a very binding experience for us as a family to go through all of these problems we ran into,” Martha says. “I think it gave the family a feeling of togetherness that, possibly, we might never have achieved in ordinary daily living. We shared all of these things’the good things and the scary things. I figured that when we had that breakdown that would be the end of the trip, but no, not for Pat.” In addition to patience and perseverance, the Patterson children also learned about some of this country’s history. They explored the historic battleground at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in Washington, D.C., and studied Mt. Rushmore through a telescope in South Dakota. “I think they liked the freedom of having our own vehicle and our housekeeping arrangements so they didn’t have to be dragged in and out of restaurants or hamburger stands,” Martha says about her kids. “It was a traveling home. I cooked at the little four-burner stove that Pat had installed and I cooked good meals, I have to say. We ate everything like we would at home, but when we got tired of being where we were we could just start up the engine and go.” They had all the facilities they needed except for a bathroom. Pat had installed a toilet in the engine room but they only had access to it from the outside, so they had to stop at trailer parks to shower. “We were stopped frequently by policemen and other people who said, ‘You can’t park a bus here,'” Martha says. “Pat’s answer was always, ‘This isn’t a bus’ and then he’d invite them to come in, and they’d look around and they were utterly surprised to see a stove and a kitchen sink and beds.” At the time of their trip, the Pattersons only knew a couple of people who had converted buses into house cars. “A few people were ahead of us in this but not many,” Martha says. “Most of the motor homes in those days had to be converted buses because those were the only vehicles you could get with enough space to make it into a home.” In the years after their cross-country journey, the Pattersons enjoyed many shorter trips in their Flexie. In the mid-1960s, Pat and Martha discovered the smaller, German Setra buses, five of which they imported and converted into motor homes. Their last motor home was a GMC with automatic transmission. Martha still cherishes the memories of her family trip and her adventures with Pat, who died unexpectedly in 1976. “On the road still has a powerful allure, and the spirit of our family’s long trip is something that my brothers and I have retained throughout our lives,” Tubach writes. “Whatever this journey meant for us, it was my father’s uncommon vision that made it possible.” Martha Patterson is the author of “The Backyard Bomber of Pacific Palisades.” Sally Patterson Tubach, who has a doctorate in German literature from UC Berkeley, is the author of “Memoirs of a Terrorist” and co-author of “An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust.” For more information about their book, visit www.motorhomepioneers.com.