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The Hitch-hiking Grandmother: "that" Grace Small

© Bernd Wechner

There's a little known woman, even among hitch-hikers, who spent the better part of her life hitch-hiking the United State and subsequently Europe. She was born in the last century, 1895, to a time when the only real mode of transport on land was the horse. She saw the motorcar enter the scene in 1910 with the delivery of three Velie "40"'s to her hometown on the prairie.

She watched her father take that first drive, no driving school, no driver's licences, there was no-one to teach, just trial and error. She learned to drive six years later, among the first women ever to drive, and the only woman in her town who drove. She would teach others to drive in a time when people thought cars like horses, letting go of the wheel as they did the reigns ... thinking the car would find its own way, as the horse!

With her father she ran a garage repairing the cars thus damaged. Pulling them out of ditches and getting them going again. She married, had four children and kept the garage going. In time the children grew up and her husband strayed ... she fled.

She was 46 years old, it was 1941, she had no money, and she'd hitched locally a few times in the '20s so she set out one winter's morn to thumb it to her daughter some 1,000 miles away. It would be the start of a career ...

She never did find her husband again, finding instead the Lord. Bible in hand, in all good faith, she would spend some 27 years hitch-hiking, crossing the United States at least 19 times and the West coast alone another 10 times, around Europe for three months 'tween March and May of '64. To be fair she used a Eurail pass much of the time, but when compelled to hitch for one reason or another, she would all the same reflect "I was thankful to be a hitchhiker and not a tourist on a group tour. I could never have had such a good time." She was 68 years old!

Her incredible story was captured along the way in many local newspaper articles, from which she won the titles The Hitchhiking Grandmother and The Hitchhiking Great Grandmother ... She stopped hitching only in 1981 at the age of 86, on account of declining health.

Ruth Barton Davies captured the whole story, cradle, almost to grave, going through Grace Small's journals and recollections with her over a period of four years from 1985. The book "The Hitchhiking Grandmother" was published in 1990.

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