$50 in My Pocket: I’m Off to See America

Take a trip with a Danish immigrant as he arrives in New York in 1916 with his ＄50.00 needed to pass through Ellis Island. Read Haldor's (Hal's) reaction to seeing the City of New York with the skyscrapers that he had never envisioned. He is amazed at seeing the first Negro people he has ever seen. Travel with him to upstate New York as he tries his hand at farming and then the owner of the farm sees that he is not a farmer. Mr. Ogden likes him enough to get him a better job as a chauffeur for a wealthy politician in the nearby town of Chatham. He is hired to drive a new car called an Owens-Magnetic and he has to travel back and forth to New York both to learn to fix it and eventually drive it. He meets interesting and influential people through the Hon. Louis F. Payn, his boss. He has the opportunity to travel to Bermuda and work at landscaping and tending the horses for Mr. Payn. Read what it was like to live in America in the early 1900's. Experience riding with Hal in a car from New York to Florida - when there were little to no paved roads south of Washington, D.C. Experience his excitement and his loneliness and then pray for him, as he lies near death from contracting Spanish Influenza. This was a deadly flu that was killing thousands of young people around him.