PRM: A Day with the Gypsies

As it was my first day at the Peoria Riverfront Museum in my new position as exhibit development intern, I spent much of my time getting to know my subjects: the Gypsy Co-eds.

Setting out from Bradford, Illinois, seventeen young women traversed most of the United States and part of Canada to make some of the most amazing memories of their lives.

In addition to the various souvenir brochures, postcards, and fliers the girls picked up along their journies, I also had the opportunity to read some of newspaper articles written about them. Local newspapers in the Central Illinois area chronicled the girls' trips, but even the daily newspaper in Toronto picked up the story. These girls made headlines wherever they went; they were kind of celebrities!

The trips' instigator, Darlene Dorgan, took the lead on corresponding with the newspapers and many other people the girls received letters from. I spent much of the morning combing through the letters Dar had sent to Henry Ford himself! The girls had visited Dearborn, Michigan, and Greenfield Village on their 1938 trek, and they had met the man himself on that visit. From then on, Ford took an interest in the girls' travels, and he personally made sure they had quality experiences on subsequent trips to New York and San Francisco in 1939 and 1940.

I also listened to an oral history by Regina (Fennell) Butte recorded in March 1998 by her own daughter that described the girls' 1939 trip to the New York World's Fair. Regina fondly recalls some of the hiccups and stops along the way to New York, detailing some of the Co-eds' exploits in Canada that the papers did not cover.

After conducting all of this research, I'm starting to formulate ideas for how to contextualze this exhibit. The car, a 1926 Ford Model T (which Henry Ford had completely overhauled on the girls' visit in 1938), will be the centerpiece. I'm thinking that I want to put the Gypsy Co-eds in the context of road trips generally, highlighting how unique their experience was for the time and how much the concept of a "road trip" has changed since then. The museum has an interactive touchscreen that I would like to utilize, and I think the oral history by Regina (Fennell) Butte could be a starting point for a larger listening gallery. The various postcards, brochures, and fliers would be used to help illuastrate the story along the way.

I'm excited to continue to gather information about these remarkable young women and tell their story.

#GypsyCoeds #travel #research