Louis Philip Trutter Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

slice in it and that's the way the water. . .that let all the water out of the basin @d so we flew
through that in an old DC3 that was unbelievable, and people standing on the qountainside were
waving at us. (Chuckle) Kitty and I grabbed each other's hands and she looked at me and I looked
at her and she said, "Well Phil, it's been fun. Let's hope."
Q. Your life has been something like Hallibwtons, the world traveller who ro* the elephants
through the khybur Pass in the late 19th Century. Do you have any other placss you fondly
remember? What about Scandinavia?
A. Nope. Never got to Scandinavia. That's another story too. Our daughter Caroline and Kitty
and I were in Denmark.
Q. Then you did get to Scandinavia?
A, Well I guess, I always think of Scandinavia as Norway, Sweden and F iqd but anyway we
went up to . . .we had a car there. We saw Denmark. It doesn't take very 10% to drive around it.
You've been there? And we went out one morning to see Elsinor, Hamlet's c tle. We went out
there and we didn't know how long it was going to take and we got through ere by about
I
eleven o'clock in the morning and we looked across the way, and they said, " ell, you can take a
pretty fast boat across if you want to spend the day in Sweden." So Kitty and Caroline looked at
each other and said, "Do we go to Sweden or do we get our hair fmed." (Ch+kJe) And the two
of them said, "Let's go get our hair washed. It needs it Phil you wander aroynd and take some
pictures and stuff, we're going to go get beautiful." And they did and we neqr got to Sweden.
Q. What about Australia?
A. We were there twice. Australia. Outback to Alice Springs, Ayers Rock. 3jl those days Alice
Springs had a maximum of about five thousand people. That's right in the rni1dle of Australia and
we got a plane, a little Cessna, I think it was, probably 182 or something like Fat and flew from
Alice Springs up to Ayers Rock. Well you don't think about distance up there like you do down
here. And that would be about the equivalent to getting a, chartering a planetfrom Springjield to
go up to Madison, Wisconsin. It,was about two hundred and fifty miles way out to Airs Rock
which is an absolutely impossible, fascinating thing which looks like the top of a loaf of bread
sticking out of the desert there. And it had rained about two days before we got there and all the
desert flowers were in full bloom Otherwise it was. . .I've got pictures of that, and airs rock is
six rniles around the bottom. It's twelve hundred feet high and the Australiam started digging
down to see how far they could, at that time, they'd gone down twenty five hpndred feet and it
was still one rock and you could climb to it if you wanted to. They didn't recqmmend it but if you
wanted to, they had some chains but twelve hundred feet high. , , a few people got killed sliding
off of it
Q. Is it a smooth or rugged?
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