UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

DEPARTMENT OF
PHYSICAL EDUCATION FOR MEN
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

While on my way to my home in Kansas City, Missouri for the Christmas
vacation (December, 1940) I had a very interesting, although tragic, exe
periencee 3

I had left Los Angeles on Friday, Hensninee 13 (%%%) and started driving
easte The weather was ideal across California and Arizona, except for some
snow at Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizonae Several days Before they had a
thirty-inch snow-fall at these placese

After leaving Flagstaff the weather was perfect clear on past Gallup,
New Mexico about one hundred milese There I started encountering snow,
but the highways were clear and so it did not prove a handicape

About twenty-five miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexice nasty weather
set in with a vengeancee Two days previous a heavy sleet storm had des-~
cended upon the country and coated everything with a sheet of ice. This
storm evidently had swept diagonally in a northeasterly direction across
the country as I never did run out of it until I was a few miles from
Lawrence, and then I think that the snow had merely covered it up.

The highway was so slick from this sleet that a speed 4s excess of
twenty-five miles per hour was next to suicidale As I look back now, I
feel as if fifteen niles per hour would have been a very fast rate. It
WAS sO slick that in negotiating the curves on the highway you had to be
exceedingly carefule If you went around them too fast, you skidded over
the ouvert edge; if you tried to so too slow, you would slide down into the
inside of the curve due to the bank of the road. I have driven on slick

pavement before, but never nothing like thate-and I never want to againe