After breakfast, we drove into downtown Knoxville, Tennessee so I could do some genealogical research at the East Tennessee Historical Society.
I spent a good few hours there. I came away with pages of detailed notes about my Crawford and Mynatt ancestors from the historical records in the society's library, as well as a stack of photocopies. I added new branches to the family tree, and expanded the information I had on the old ones. I could have spent days there, but I made the most of the time I had.
While I was engaged in research, my mother and grandmother walked around the city. It was in the midst of a major economic downturn, and many stores and businesses were closed for good. They told me it felt like a ghost town, with an unusual lack of noise in the central business district for a late morning workday.
Returning to the path of Interstate 40, we left Knoxville behind. 283 miles (455 km) and an occasional stop at a Stuckey's convenience store later, we arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we finally said farewell to I-40 after having traveled it since we left Los Angeles, California six days earlier.
We took U.S. Route 421 55 miles (89 km) south to Sanford, North Carolina, where my grandmother's older brother Phillip Herbert "Herb" Sanders lived. I'd met Granduncle Herb once before, when he came out to Washington State for a visit in the late 1980s and stayed with my mother and I.
Like my grandmother, Herb was born and raised in Yakima, Washington. Herb's late wife Juanita was born in the Sanford area, and he met her during World War II when he was a private in the US Army stationed in South Carolina before shipping off to Europe. After he retired from working at Washington State's Hanford Site (famous for providing the plutonium for the Trinity nuclear test and the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki) in the early 1970s, they decided to return to where she was from to live out the rest of their lives. He remained there after she died in 1985 until his own death in 2002.
Herb took us out to dinner at a nice steakhouse. Dinner was going fine until something set him off and he began to rant about African-Americans. There were several African-American patrons in the restaurant who were visibly less than pleased, and my mother and my grandmother managed to shut him up before there was any kind of confrontation. I was embarrassed to be at the same table with him, so I excused myself. Afterwards, my grandmother said he'd never been like that in all the years she'd known him before he moved to North Carolina.
After dinner, Herb took us to Wal-Mart to do some shopping. There were no Wal-Marts in the Seattle, Washington area at the time, so this was our first visit to one. We came away unimpressed. The atmosphere inside the store made it feel like it had seen better days even though it was clearly a new store. It was like a sad second-hand store. It wasn't much like a Wal-Mart now.
On the way to Wal-Mart, my grandmother rode in Herb's car while my mother and I followed. Herb drove like a bat out of Hell at 60 mph (97 kph) down streets where the speed limit was only half that, while my mother struggled to keep up. He almost lost us several times.
We spent the night at Herb's house. He showed us some artwork my great-grandaunt Lillian Jane McIntosh (née Sanders) had painted in the 1930s. He also proudly showed off his collections of stamps and collectible plates, two of his great passions.
Total Travel Distance: 338 miles (544 km)
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