Big Pines, 1937

This is a 3 minute home movie taken during a camping trip to Big Pines, in the San Bernardino mountains east of Los Angeles. The movie was filmed by my father, Roman Freulich. It was taken in the summer of 1937 and includes shots of me, age about four, my mother, Katia, my sister Judy, and my aunt and uncle, Miriam and Louis Bernstein.

When I was small, my mother, my sister and I spent our summers camping at Big Pines. Sometimes we were joined by a cousin. We always left on a Saturday around the 4th of July. And once we settled in, my mother, sister, and I spent the entire summer at Big Pines.  My father (the youngest son of Nisla Halborn) and sometimes my aunt and uncle, would drive up on Saturday afternoons to join us and disappear again early Monday morning to return for another week of work.

It took two cars piled high with the heavy camping gear that was available in the 1930s to get us to our camp site. And the trip, which takes about an hour and a half today, was an all day affair, usually involving one or more breakdowns -- boiling  radiators that spewed rusty water, flat tires and, sometimes, brakes that liquified in the heat.  It was always a great adventure. And my mother, knowing what was ahead, always prepared a huge picnic lunch so that we could sit on the side of the road and eat while my father and uncle worked on one – or both – of the old cars.