Dad's Trip - 1930 In 1930, my father, the late Rev. Hiram Vander Klay, after his first year in Calvin Seminary, as a member of the seminary quartet, spent the entire summer on tour with John T. Holwerda, John Kenbeek, and Casey Schooland.  They traveled west, all the way to the Pacific and back, presenting programs in Christian Reformed Churches along the way, financing their trip with the collections. They traversed this territory with a 1928 Model A Ford, upon whose rear bumper they affixed a large wooden box to hold their clothes and a few musical instruments.  They traveled over many bad roads and through the mountain passes of Yosemite, Yellowstone, as well as others in Colorado, California, Washington, and New Mexico. They fixed flat tires innumerable times but had no troubles with the tough little Ford, except for replacing a broken front spring and having a new rear door window installed.   Although my mother, then engaged to my father, was not happy at the prospect of his being away from Grand Rapids, their home city, for an entire summer, she did give him a Shaeffer's "Life- time" fountain pen and pencil set done in a beautiful mottled black and white translucent shell-like material. As a little boy I admired that set which he used virtually every day. I now have it on my study desk.  The mechanical pencil works perfectly. The bladder of the pen will no longer suck up ink, but when you dip it in a bottle of ink it still writes as smooth as glass.  I think it was that fountain pen he used to keep his diary of the trip in a small 3 by 5 inch notebook.  Accompanying it is a large number of black and white snapshots and several black and white postcards of the scenic places they saw.   Dad's writing has not always been easy to read.  Parts of the journal were scribbled hurriedly, and some sections were obviously written while the Model A was bouncing along the roads of the day.  Some names of people and places were familiar to me, others I ascertained, when the writing got bad, from the CRC Yearbook and my Rand McNally Road Atlas.  My familiarity with his characteristic syntax helped as well.  Following is a pretty accurate rendering of the diary of his trip.         Stan Vander Klay Hiram’s Link to CRC Minister’s Database