Sometime in the mid-1930s my great-grandma, born Vera Gazaway, wrote an essay. The essay itself is lost to the past—and to the soap company that sponsored the essay-writing contest she would go on to win. Some days I play pretend, musing on her musings, wondering if she used a typewriter or a fountain pen. Other days I feel more willing to accept the losses of time, the gaps in my family history, the mirrors of my matriarchal line.
From the essay contest, Vera won a car. She was in her early twenties in the Panhandle of Texas, married to her first husband; she was a mom to two young boys. After she won the car, she took off. I have spent many hours, now, speculating about that time. About what a woman in the 1930s does with a car. And as far as I can tell—as many emails as I can shoot off to distant cousins and aunts and even her last living son—no one seems to know what occupied those years. She disappeared until 1939, when she reemerged in my family mythology in San Angelo, Texas. She picked the boys up from the Panhandle, divorced her first husband and married her second—my great-grandfather. She was pregnant with my grandmother, who would be born in January of 1940.
In the mid-1930s, my great-grandma would have been as rare as rain. It was the middle of the Great Depression, the middle of an eleven-year drought in the Panhandle, and, for the first time since the invention of the automobile, car sales were down. Fewer than half of American households had cars, and an even smaller number of women drove within these homes.
Used cars would have run upward of $500, which is comparable to about $10,000 today. And if my great-grandma was driving a car, she needed gas, which ran about 19 cents a gallon, or $4 by today’s standards. Of course, she’d also have to prepare for the occasional repair or maintenance: oil changes, overheating engines, blown tires—the rough roads not yet adapted for the world of the motor vehicle.
***
The first car I ever drove was a 2002 Ford Windstar that took my family everywhere for the almost-decade before it became mine. By the time it made its way to me, just three months after I turned 16, it had 200,000 miles on the odometer, a broken cassette player, and was on its third transmission. But it was a car, so none of that mattered.
After passing the driving test through sheer luck, I was on the road. Because my minivan had three rows, my friends always piled into it when we needed to get somewhere. It could hold six people in addition to myself—seven if someone sat on the floor between the two captain’s chairs in the second row.
I drove myself to school, work, band practice, friends’ houses, took all of us to downtown Austin where we’d sit in coffee shops until they closed or walk around the grounds of the Capitol because there’s only so much you can do at 16.
After a year or so, my mom would let me drive to Boerne and Dallas to visit grandparents. I’d stop everywhere along the way: gas stations, rest stops, pie shops, tiny hat shops in the Hill Country. I was so young and wanted to be so unafraid of everything, but I was always so scared, so worried. Some mornings, I’d fill my backpack for school, sit behind the wheel, and think about how I could go anywhere. I knew almost all the routes out of Austin, and even if I didn’t, they were all printed on MapQuest pages stacked in my car’s console. I wanted to go to the beach or drink coffee at a diner in the middle of the desert.
But I never did—I always played it safe. I felt an obligation to my life as the oldest daughter and I was willing to participate in the game of the teenage years. To push the boundaries just enough without getting caught, without the consequence of losing my car or my mother’s trust. My sister and I would butt heads over this idea: to behave a certain way for our overarching wants. I wanted a late curfew, I wanted weekend trips, I wanted my car, my phone, to be liked. For this, I was willing to exchange babysitting my sisters, driving them to school, keeping up with chores, doing my homework, being pleasant, agreeable, polite.
***
Vera Isabelle Gazaway was born in 1906 in what would become Oklahoma the following year. She weighed only two pounds, and the midwife told my great-great-grandmother that her daughter wasn’t likely to live. She was named Vera because her father loved it, and her mother hated it, so upon learning the baby would die, she agreed to name her Vera. As if Vera heard this herself, my great-grandma outlived all of her siblings, the three that came before her and the two that followed, making it into the new millennium and the tender age of 95.
Vera came to Texas by covered wagon. The exact year is fuzzy, but by age 14 she had arrived in the Panhandle—this I know from an old photo my family has preserved through the generations with care. She’s on a horse with the flat West Texas land behind her, extending into oblivion. She’s got a short 1920s bob and a cloche hat covering her scalp. She’s like a flapper on a horse, a beam of light in the arid Panhandle.
***
It would be far-fetched for me to believe that the freedom of a car in 1935 meant the same thing that it meant to me in 2011. Every family I knew owned a car. In fact, by the end of 2011, the United States Department of Transportation reported that the average number of vehicles per household was 1.9, while the average number of drivers per household was 1.8. Meaning, the year I started driving, there were more cars than drivers in the average American home.
The average price of a used vehicle had risen above $9,000 for the first time and gas was only $3 a gallon—making it more affordable to own a car in 2011 than it would have been for my great-grandma in the 1930s.
When I try to find the percentage of women drivers in America in 2011, I turn up with articles about NASCAR or F1 women drivers or driving services with women employees or studies about female road rage. It is no great feat anymore for me to drive a car. And yet, it grants the average American teenager their first taste of independence.
My van never had more than half a tank of gas and less than 10 CDs. The heater broke one winter, and I had to wear a coat when I drove. I patterned it with bumper stickers and hung necklaces on the rearview and checked the oil when I remembered. I once drove it for a stretch of almost eight months with a single, fuzzy headlight. It overheated my sophomore year of college and died next to the donut shop on campus that regularly failed health inspection—but freedom looked different at 20 than it did at 16, and the car wasn’t my only access point anymore. I had spare savings and more control over my life. I chose the classes I took and my schedule and my major, which I’d change and choose four times before the end of my college career.
***
During her life, Vera would be married and divorced to four men five times, though my grandmother would be her last child. Her marriages took her all over West Texas, from San Angelo to Midland to Seminole to Happy. She was a stay-at-home mom, though that term didn’t exist at the time. She was a gardener, an expert canner, a quilter, whether by interest or necessity—she was good at it all. She helped her third husband run a girls’ boarding house and threw parties that got tiny blurbs in the newspaper, which I know, because she cut each one out into irregular rectangles that were saved and passed down to my grandmother, and to my mother. They now live in a small plastic bin in the garage.
In her time (about the early 1950s), my great-grandma would not have been able to sign contracts, buy or sell property, or open a bank account without a husband. It’s easy, sometimes, for me to see Vera as a typical housewife. When I find her pictures she looks the part—her hair is big and parted to the side, her dresses flare out after the waist, there’s thin necklaces around her collarbone. But to divorce at this time was almost unheard of—to live without a man, almost impossible, the divorce rate a mere 2.5% at its highest point in the decade. I searched for divorce records, just to see her name written somewhere, to take her beyond myth, but Texas doesn’t keep them publicly before the 1960s, which would be after most of my great-grandma’s marriages. When I think of her through this light, she seems radical—a woman who would not stay if it didn’t suit her.
At times in my life, I have felt an urge to think of her as difficult, as the kind of woman who couldn’t keep a man in her home. But who am I to judge? To see a woman leaving and cast blame? I’ve left relationships before, lived with people I was not married to—my lifetime allows it. What if men were her means to an end? Her ability to play the cards she was dealt and turn it into her freedom, her livelihood.
***
I have tried countless times to dream up where my great-grandma Vera went with her car. In some daydreams, she has a lover in another state and they’ve been penning letters back and forth for years. The love is great enough, interesting enough, to urge her to leave her family. He works for the soap company and rigs the competition—she wins the car and is on her way. But I hate this version, I hate slotting her further into the housewife role.
I like when I imagine she is set to see something beyond Oklahoma and Texas and its flatness. I imagine she follows the path I’ve been on tens of times, up the Raton Pass and into the Colorado mountains. She could find work as one of the few women hired as park-ranger naturalists and spend her years in the pines and the snow. Then, maybe, one night cooking in a cast-iron pan, she sees the pan’s handle—and, wistfully, thinks of the Panhandle—and heads home.
At times, I’m a pessimist. I think she barely scrapes by, barely finds coins for gas, motels to stay in. Her 4’11” frame wastes away and she turns back out of necessity, out of no emotional need, only a physical one.
I construct stories with the knowledge I do have and fill in the parts I don’t. I know her second husband, my great-grandfather, was a French-Canadian immigrant living in New Jersey. With that bookend, I imagine her heading east, making her way through the never-ending country between her and the Atlantic. I imagine coins in every cranny of the car, folded bills in the lining of her bags, how much money she needed just to get herself there without even considering the food or the shelter. I imagine the two of them meeting on a boardwalk or the beach while she takes endless inhales of the salt air. The dampest, richest air she’s ever breathed.
I try not to think of the circumstances that make a woman leave her husband and two sons at a time when her options were few. I know it is a crucial piece of the puzzle, but the realities seem too painful. They seem like they can only be that of great suffering.
When my family lived in Colorado, we would drive back to Texas two or three times a year. I was old enough for the front seat and would serve as my mother’s co-pilot, passing snacks to my sisters or changing CDs out over the 13- or 15- or 18-hour drive. My mom would spend the whole time telling me stories: about engineering school or being a military wife or her childhood. We’d always drive through Happy, Texas, “The Town Without a Frown,” and she’d tell me about visiting Grandma Vera there. How she could grow anything, can everything, how she would have survived an apocalypse without batting an eye.
My mom would tell me about college and getting married and having kids and how she always followed the path of life just as it was laid out for her. How she never wavered, how she wishes she had swerved, had lived her life for just her. And she would. Her marriage would end, and she would move my sisters and me back to Texas and she would go out on weeknights for live music and spend weekends in New Orleans and weeks in Scotland or Paris. She would quit her job of a decade and work somewhere that made her feel good. But that wouldn’t be for years.
My parents never expected marriage of me, which doesn’t sound radical for a woman born at the end of the twentieth century, yet I found myself surrounded by the notion, surrounded by women raised to be wed. But my parents, they rarely spoke of it, instead about my education or jobs or the places I could live. When I visited Europe for the first time at 19, my mom wrote me an email and said, “Are you sure you want to come back to America? Maybe living in Europe for a while would be fun!” But I was already registered for my sophomore year of college. I had an undergraduate teaching assistant position lined up. I was the reporter for a service organization. I had obligations to attend to stateside.
I have never felt the pressure to marry, no fear of anxiously awaiting a proposal or a ring. But I have feared my mother’s omen: to live my life just for me. There is always someone else in mind, someone to please or placate. A standard to meet. And I don’t mean to draw a line between my great-grandma’s reality and my own, just that, sometimes, I’d like to veer.
On those drives to and from Colorado, when the road was open, when I was younger—all plain, the space between New Mexico and Texas—my mom would let me drive. It felt so easy to drive in a straight line. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was. I could follow the dotted lines forever.
***
It is hard to believe that if Vera were born at the same time as me she would have married and had two children by age twenty. That she would have married again at all. That she would have lived her life for anybody except herself. That she wouldn’t have had to write off to a contest and win a car, that she would have worked and saved up to buy a beater.
For the most part, everything I know for certain about my great-grandma Vera can be contained to a few pages, contained here. But my speculation can go much further. We are so different, born nearly 90 years apart, and yet I find myself looking at the silhouette of her face on that horse in the Panhandle and wondering what she’s thinking. If she knows her life will unfold as it did. Had she always had the urge to go—did she want to pull the reins of her horse in that moment and just run into the ceaseless, dry, level West Texas horizon?
***
Sometimes, because it’s all my imagination, all my choosing, I imagine she isn’t alone when she leaves. I imagine it’s the two of us, and I’m doing what I shouldn’t be doing. I’m leaving everyone behind. We’re making our way down whichever road looks smoothest. Our tires never blow. We find gold in California. We run for mayor in every major city along Route 66, but we don’t take the job. The Depression doesn’t touch us. We laugh. We cut our hair real short. We sleep in the back of the car and we never feel scared. We see the rivers and the valleys, the mountains and the forests, the oceans and the cities. We see everything that isn’t the Panhandle, everything that isn’t Texas. Everything that isn’t everything we’ve already seen.
Riley Welch is a writer from Texas. Her work has appeared in The Raw Art Review and Hobart After Dark, among others. She was the 2024 – 2025 Writer-in-Residence at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, where she stewarded Porter’s childhood home. You can find more of her work at rrrileywwwelch.com.
Leave a Reply