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As Union card holders, they could "pull a traveling card". This meant that you could go into any newspaper and see if anyone was looking for a "sub". This means that the permanent employee would like to take his vacation or some extra time off, and then my parents could step in and work in their place. As a result of this lifestyle we moved from town to town and my brother and I went to many different schools in a year. I remember, and have been told, at least 8 in my second grade year. In the 50's traveling in the car wasn't entertaining or really much fun. No air-conditioning. AM Radio with spotty reception. No seat belts. Traveling through Arizona on Route 66 for the fourth or fifth time, with two irritable fighting children in the back seat, my parents must have been out of their minds. To beat the heat, we used a window hung evaporative cooler (like the one in the photo) and hung canvas bags of water in front of the radiator to keep the car from boiling over. My parents would take turns driving and would place wet towels on the arm that was exposed to the blistering sun to keep from blistering themselves. My mother or father would read stories to us during these long long drives and read from historical novels and text books and we would discuss, ask questions and absorb the information like the little mind sponges that children are. We played a game where we would add up the numbers on the license plates ahead of us and see who got the right answer first. My mother usually won because the rest of us are math challenged. We would name the animals that we have seen and see who got the most between towns. Who could spot the most cars from different States. My brother and I, take turns reading the road signs. And when we were all tired out, climb over the back seat and go to sleep on the pillows and blankets in the back of the wagon. I imagine that was a huge relief for my parents. Blessed silence.

We called "thinking of a thing" "twenty questions" If no one got it in twenty questions you had to come up with another "thing". Our favorite game was the alphabet game, just picking the letters up from the signs on the road was the easy way, getting through the alphabet from license plates took forever. We didn't travel as much as you, but we did a lot of the same things when I was a kid.

Source: Dust Bunnies of the Mind