Six Girls On A Hoot!!!
Yellowstone National Park -1926

Review by: Pauline Mounsey, Editor, The Lucid Stone Magazine.
Member: National League of American Pen Women, in Letters.

It is not often we get to peek into someone else's journal, and yet this is exactly what author Elizabeth Lenci-Downs has allowed us to do with the publication of Six Girls On A Hoot!!! Yellowstone National Park 1926. This daily journal was kept by her mother (Violet) on a trip with five girlfriends ("the gang") in 1926 to and through Yellowstone National Park. Violet's "little black diary" lets the reader follow their day-to-day adventuring.

" Six Girls On A Hoot!!! Yellowstone National Park 1926 is a pleasant read with a generous offering of vintage photographs taken during the trip. Lenci-Downs has a sensibility for giving us enough background information on the participants in the book without overshadowing the story itself, a trip by six young women before they go separate ways and settle down into their adult lives. There is a brief explanation about each of the girls."

Even the car has its own character description (a 1924 Studebaker Model EL Special Six).

---Pauline Mounsey, Editor, The Lucid Stone Magazine.

Six Girls On A Hoot!!!
Yellowstone National Park -1926
Review by: Mike Scharnow, Editor: The Fountain Hills Times, Fountain Hills, Arizona.

Many of us have grown up hearing stories told to us by mom or dad - stories about "how things were" or perhaps something wild and crazy they did as youngsters. Elizabeth Lenci-Downs had much more than that - she uncovered written notes that her mother had penned in 1926 about a wild trip taken in a borrowed 1924 Studebaker Model E.L. "Special Six" with a ladder on top.

Route 66 and Jack Kerouac conjure up images of the Wild West and wild road trips - but six girls on a lark in 1926 driving from northern Minnesota to Yellowstone National Park? It happened - and Lenci-Downs published the "unabridged journal" in a small book she calls Six Girls On A Hoot!!!

Perhaps one of the most ironic things is that Lenci-Downs hadn't heard a thing about the trip until she unearthed the journal while preparing the family homestead for sale after her mother's death. As Lenci-Downs states in the forward about the discovery:

"A brown leather portfolio left the softness of ages upon her fingertips. Silken cords bound-round it. Sitting there on the floor, Elizabeth pulled it to her out of the dark recesses of her deceased mother's bookcase and removed a film of ancient dustiness. Golden words, impressed long ago, stood out from the rustic leather:

Our Yellowstone Tour
July 15-Aug. 3, 1926
Off On a Hoot!!!"

"It was priceless," Lenci-Downs says. "I thought, 'This has got to be published.' I didn't say anything to my two brothers. I decided to publish it just for fun and present it to them."

The 1926 journey involved six female friends who had been hanging around with each other since high school. "The Gang" included three Norwegian sisters (Florence, Gertrude and Violet) along with three others - Lilly, Myrtle and Hazel all of Virginia, Minnesota. During high school the six had taken a three-hour journey to Duluth to march in a suffragette parade - a precursor of their boldness and unique approach to life. By 1926 these single, professional women ages 23 to 32 decided to take one more journey.

Vi wrote to a different friend in June of 1926: "We've decided on one more adventure together. You know - 'Go off on a Hoot!!!' People are telling us that such a trip is unheard of for young ladies - and I can hardly wait!"

Violet was actually Violet Hazel Hansen of Virginia, Minn., the future mother of Lenci-Downs. The "boyfriend" who lent the Studebaker for the wild lark was John D. Lenci, who eventually married Vi and became the father to Elizabeth (and a highly respected builder in Minnesota.) Vi and John were married five months after the trip.

Lenci-Downs spent considerable time attempting to get information about the other five women and what became of their families. "I put ads in newspapers in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan," she says. "I found a niece in New Jersey from one of those ads." Vi was a witty writer and an amateur photographer. The journal included 40 pictures, and Lenci-Downs put 20 of them in her book.

Violet ended up doing most of the driving - lumbering across the northlands of Minnesota, both Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming on uncharted roads, detouring down cow paths. When a door is ripped off because of a grizzly bear, Lilly simply tied it back on with a rope. Vi would write down diary entries as they sat on the floor of service garages in the dead of night, sitting on the ground beside a pup tent or bouncing over prairie dog holes across prairie when Myrtle took over the driving at times. Scribbles were in shorthand and later transcribed to the leather portfolio by Vi.

Lenci-Downs says, "Violet's words do everything but sing. Her unusual, witty descriptions of the 'wild west' and her insight into human nature stir delight and open laughter."