Trip of

a lifetime

'Great Trek' of 1936 recalled

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- High school graduation usually brings anxiety and hope for most students.

For Edgar Duin, Howard Aufderheide and Homer Schweppe, college was on the horizon in the spring of 1936, but the months that followed graduation brought something else.

Something exciting and new. Something the three of them would never forget.

They called it "The Great Trek." And it took them halfway across the country, opening their eyes to the many possibilities life had in store.

The men, who grew up together in New Ulm, were three of a class of 30 students who started and finished school at Dr. Martin Luther High School.

On Saturday, the men now in their 80s, reminisced about the "Great Trek" at a gathering at in New Ulm.

Being a teenager in the late 1930s "was just a matter of messing around," Duin said.

"None of us had a car. We walked up the hill and back down," Duin remembered.

The "Great Trek" was Aufderheide's idea. His father gave him enough money to buy a second-hand Chevrolet sedan, which was affectionately nicknamed "Vi."

Duin, Aufderheide and Schweppe left New Ulm shortly after graduation. The trip made a giant triangle across the western part of the country, taking the better part of three weeks. Aufderheide drove most of the way.

The triangle stretched from New Ulm to Yellowstone to Las Vegas back to New Ulm.

Duin took a Kodak camera and a note book covered in green vinyl, embossed with the year 1934 on its cover.

They rode mostly with the car's windows down. They slept in tents, which they often pitched next to Vi. They cooked their own food as a way to save money.

Vi's tires went bald right after the boys put them on, so they spent their own money fixing them. Whenever Vi would arrive at a destination, Duin would take notes on what he'd seen and where he'd seen it.

One of the first destinations was the Black Hills of South Dakota. The trio stopped in Keystone, S.D., at Mount Rushmore, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers were still laboring away on the busts of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.

They later stopped in Salt Lake City. They listened to he Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearsing.

When they reached Las Vegas, they turned around.

Duin was very impressed by the sight of the Las Vegas strip. It was the first and only time he's been there.They gambled a little. Even though gambling had just been made legal five years earlier, the strip was already bustling with neon lights. They also saw the recently-finished Boulder Dam, located on the Colorado River outside Las Vegas and now known as the Hoover Dam.

Duin saved his black and white snapshots of the sights in an album. They include Devil's Tower in Wyoming, the Buffalo Bill monument in Cody, Wyo., Sylvan Lake, which is near one of the highest points in South Dakota, the Grand Canyon and Old Faithful, Yellowstone's famous geyser.

And then there's a shot of a small brown bear crossing a road, close to the nose of the car.

"Howard tried to put a hat on the bears," Duin remembered. "They used to steal from open cars."

There are more shots of Old Faithful and a few frames of Pike's Peak. There are images of the Grand Tetons and a couple pictures of Howard and Homer in the bathing trunks, standing on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.

"It's terrible," Duin remembers. "I was taking the salt out of my hair for weeks after that."

Tourism really didn't get going until after World War II. Roads were rough in 1936, making the journey "kinda rugged," Duin said. Interestingly enough, he doesn't recall Vi ever running out of gas.

Duin started putting his album together almost right after he got the film back from the developer. The book got lots of interest in the beginning and he still shows it to folks who visit his house.

"I taught me you've got to take a few chances and if you want to get somewhere, buy yourself some new tires," Duin said.

Duin now lives in Falls Church, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. He comes back to New Ulm occasionally.

"I like the place and I like the culture. My wife says whenever I come back I start talking in German," Duin said.

Schweppe lives in Maryland. Duin said he sees him a few times a month, usually over lunch.

After World War II ended, Duin stayed in the military and went into the National Security Administration and later transferred into the CIA. He retired in 1980.

Schweppe worked for the FBI and retired in 1977.

Aufderheide eventually became a full colonel in the U.S. Air Force and later went to Lutheran seminary.

"To the degree that we had never done that before, it was something new and it opened up our desire to do more of those things," said Duin, of the "Great Trek."

Edgar and Dorothy Duin traveled the world together, having visited Europe, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. The most interesting trip was a journey to Russia in 1997. He said it was interesting for him because of his work with the CIA.

Duin spends his time reading a lot and translating. He speaks German and Russian. He admits he writes Russian better than he speaks it. He's currently working on transcribing some old letters of his father's that were written in German.

Aufderheide lives in San Diego, but he, Schweppe and Duin still communicate by e-mail.