Visited Arbor Lake (1923)

CLARKE

Posted By: Marilyn Holmes (email)
Date: 1/18/2009 at 06:50:17

Grinnell (IA) Herald; Aug. 7, 1923

VISITED ARBOR LAKE.
Tourist Writes of Experiences at Grinnell's Tourist Camp.

The following paragraph on Arbor Lake was written by Anna Ross Clarke who with her husband, is making a tour of Iowa tourist camps and writes her experiences for the Des Moines Register.

"And then Grinnell. Arbor Lake, just south of town. A municipal bathing beach, noisy and open, although it was midnight. And the wooded tracts set aside for tourists, jammed, every inch of space taken, cars and tents so thick you could scarcely make your way in. Cars from nearly every state, tents of every description. I laughed over a funny thing I saw there. Did you see a cartoon recently of a woman weeping because her brand new car was absolutely ruined? Then a close up, a tiny scratch, the very first? I thought of it that morning at sunrise. An Illinois car was directly in my view, looking out of the glass in the back of my car. Husband was sleeping in the auto tent. But wife, barefooted, otherwise much overdressed in a green cloth dress trimmed elaborately in large wooden beads, was carrying water in a hand basin and washing the wheels; she just couldn't stand to see the dust of Iowa Roads on the wheels of her new car."