About the diary writer
- Barbara McDowell Whitt
- Kansas City, Missouri, Alexandria, Virginia, United States
- ~ About: A 1961-65 Park College Diary ~ As a high school girl and then a college coed in the first half of the 1960s, I wrote nightly entries on the pages of one-year diaries. In January 2010 I began transcribing the entries into a blog and gave each one a title. I grew up on three farms within 30 miles of Iowa City and the University of Iowa with its Iowa Writers' Workshop. As the oldest of four daughters, in my diaries I sometimes referred to my sisters as "the kids" or "the girls." We helped our parents, but we also had good, wholesome fun - a characteristic I took with me to Park. Park is 300 miles southwest of West Chester, Iowa, in Parkville, Missouri, on the Missouri River 10 miles northwest of Kansas City, Missouri, and across the river from Kansas City, Kansas. In 2000 Park College became Park University. Today Park's flagship campus is in Parkville and there are an additional 41 campus centers across the nation. Park was one of the first educational institutions in the United States to offer online learning. My last post was on May 22, 2018. I may be followed on Twitter @BarbaraMcDWhitt.
We Visited "Little Town on the Prairie" - Tuesday, July 31, 1962
Tonight we're in a motel in Spencer. It even has a swimming pool so we just finished having a dip. We saw Huron College this morning and then we came through DeSmet that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about as "Little Town on the Prairie" in her last "Little House" book. It was so wonderful - we saw the false front stores, then drove out of town toward where we thought they might have lived. We drove through a little country cemetery and there were Ma and Pa's graves, Mary's, Carrie's, and Laura's baby son's. We found a marker for their home site on the prairie south of town then, and the cottonwood trees Pa planted! Then we came through Volga, I called and saw Dick Peeke and found Jim at the Brookings swimming pool life guarding. We saw one of Daddy's college farm men near Worthington, Minnesota.
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4 comments:
I loved your comments today especially since Hilarys had just done the Little House visit last year and had similar descriptions.
I remember Hilary posting photos and writing about their discoveries on her blog.
I loved today's comments also. So neat to get to see that. I love that Pa's trees are still there.
Suzanne, I remember how impressed your Grandma McDowell was to see how big the cottonwood trees had grown.
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