The Bardwells pose with the Collegiate Caravan around the time of the family’s six-week trip out west in 1952. The children ranged in age from nine months to thirteen years. The family, from left: Cornell, in the arms of maid Beatrice Houston; T’Lane, Loyola Bardwell with Auburn, Stanford Sr., Stanford Jr. and Duke. In the window are Princeton, left, and Harvard.
Real estate developer Stanford Bardwell Sr. had one of the first car phones in Baton Rouge. The Bardwell family’s kitchen on Jefferson Highway had a microwave oven in the 1950s. In the summer of 1952, Bardwell had a school bus modified to become what, one day, would be called a recreational vehicle. A newspaper story referred to the forerunner of the now-ubiquitous RV as “a land yacht.”
“It was an invention born of necessity,” said son Stanford Bardwell Jr., a Baton Rouge lawyer and former U.S. Attorney.
Earlier that year, the Bardwells had traveled to Florida towing a small trailer behind a station wagon crammed with seven children and the family maid. They stopped for the night at a motel. The next morning, Bardwell was presented a bill for $50 (more than $400 today).
“That settles it,” he told his wife, Loyola. “From now on, we’ll travel some other way.”
Back in Baton Rouge, Stanford and Loyola looked at travel trailers. The biggest they found carried just seven people and cost almost $6,000.
“We further learned that it’s illegal to carry passengers in such a vehicle while it’s in motion,” Loyola wrote in a 1955 Parade magazine story. “Then, one day, Stan said, ‘I’ve got it. We’ll buy a bus.’”
Bardwell found a new school bus at a car dealership. The fifty-six-seat, thirty-two-foot-long bus had been rejected by the school board as too big.
“Stan took it to a friend in the trailer construction business who removed the seats and remodeled the interior,” Loyola wrote. “It was the beginning of a new life for all of us.”
Newspaper, magazine, and television reporters loved the idea of the Baton Rouge couple putting their seven children and maid into a converted school bus to travel the country. Even better, the bus bore the first name of each of the Bardwells on college pennants painted on the side of the bus: Stanford (senior and junior); the children’s mother, Loyola; and brothers and sisters Duke, T’Lane, Harvard, Princeton, Auburn, and Cornell. (Duke’s middle name, Kane, allowed him to represent two colleges, Duke University and Duquesne.) In the Parade story, Loyola’s byline appeared beneath the headline: “Collegiate Caravan.”
Early in their dating days in 1938, Stan and Loyola realized they shared the names of colleges. “Then and there we decided to name our children, if we ever had any, for colleges,” Loyola said.
The children never considered their eccentric names an embarrassment, said Auburn Bardwell Harris, a teacher in Panama City, Florida. “It was always fun,” she said.
Left: Loyola Bardwell, rear, works in the galley after children have gone to bed. Mattresses, resting on sheets of wood stored during the day, covered the aisle space at night.
The Bardwells made it into Ripley’s Believe It or Not and a book called 10,000 Baby Names, Auburn said. Along with the story in Parade magazine, the family and bus were featured in Popular Mechanics, newspapers around the country, and a Smithsonian exhibit on American travel.
The Bardwells hadn’t thought to include the maid, Beatrice Houston, in their name game until a newspaper reporter asked how long it had taken to find a maid named Houston. In 1952, when the family appeared on Art Linkletter’s House Party television show in Los Angeles, Beatrice proudly claimed the University of Houston as her namesake.
A motorcycle policeman had intercepted the bus on the outskirts of Los Angeles to escort the Bardwells to the television studio. An understanding Hollywood cop allowed Stan Sr. to park the bus at the curb near Grauman’s Chinese Theater while father and the older children went to a movie. The younger children got into their pajamas to sleep on the bus.
The family’s appearance on the Linkletter show was arranged by a friend of Bardwell’s at CBS affiliate WAFB in Baton Rouge.
“We’d never heard of the Linkletter show,” said Stan Jr. “It was a daytime show.”
The most memorable thing about being on national television, Stan Jr. said, was each child’s receiving a flashlight at the end of the show. “I guess for reading under the blanket or getting around in a campground at night.”
A few days after the Collegiate Caravan rolled into the driveway, the magnitude of what the family had achieved arrived at the Bardwell house in the form of a twenty-five-inch television set, courtesy of the Linkletter show.
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The bus stayed in the family for a dozen years, making shorter trips and providing a playhouse in the driveway. “Cornell and I played with our dolls, Georgia and Oklahoma,” Auburn said. “Dad and his friends took the bus to LSU football games; Dad didn’t drink, so he always drove.”
But it was that first Western vacation trip in the bus that stood out for the children, who ranged in age from nine months to thirteen years.
Sisters Cornell (the nine-month-old) and Auburn (then age two) remember little of the Western trip but enjoyed the freedom of the bus compared to the cramped quarters of the station wagon. “I rode in the small space behind the last seat in the station wagon,” said Cornell, a retired special education teacher.
During that six-week trip west, the bus made stops at the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Hoover Dam, Carlsbad Caverns, and Yellowstone. “There was no air conditioning [on the bus],” said developer Princeton Bardwell, who was five during the trip, “so the climate control captain, usually my dad, would determine when and which windows got opened and when the fans would come on.”
Large fans mounted on the walls of the bus moved air around. “At night, there were strategically placed lights for reading, and after curtains were closed and bedtime clothes changed into, the aisle space would be covered with solid sheets of wood,” Princeton said. The sheets of wood were carried under mattresses that made up day beds under the bus windows during the day. Beatrice Houston slept behind a privacy curtain on a cot that fit securely across the aisle behind the driver’s seat.
“Of course, there were no RV parks,” Princeton said. “But it wasn’t hard to find places to stay. We parked at a church camp once. Other times, we’d find places, like a mobile home park. If it was a warm night, it would be particularly fortunate if we could plug into the electrical power of our host. When that wasn’t possible, we ran the gasoline generator to run the fans.”
The family’s clothes fit in drawers beneath the sofa beds along the walls. A galley in the rear of the bus had a butane stove, refrigerator, and sink. There was a collapsible dining table. A bathroom was fitted with a shower and chemical toilet. A flat, one hundred-gallon water tank hugged the roof of the bus.
Stan Jr. had just turned twelve when the family headed west in August 1952.
Among the things entrusted to him as oldest child was his father’s top-of-the-line movie camera. “I did some casual filming under his supervision,” Stan Jr. said. “It was quite a camera with three lenses—standard, telescopic, and wide angle.”
To the boy’s amazement, Stan Sr. asked if he’d like to take the wheel of the land yacht.
“Somewhere on the outbound leg in a very unpopulated section of road in Arizona or New Mexico, my dad let me drive the bus,” Stan Jr. said. “It was my first experience driving anything, which was at first terrifying, then thrilling.”
The boy mastered the bus’ manual transmission on long, straight stretches of highway “where you might encounter another vehicle heading in the opposite direction once an hour.” Stan Jr. was at the helm as the bus met the first foothills. “But when we got to really higher elevations, with switchback turns up and down, I was ‘relieved’ of duty.”
Stan Sr. put together a 16mm movie of the bus odyssey. As backup cameraman, Stan Jr. captured on film a mother bear and cubs swimming across a stream in Yellowstone Park.
On the way home, Stan Sr. had to stop in a small town “somewhere in the West” to get some cash, said Stan Jr. His father called a banker in Baton Rouge to vouch for him. After what seemed a long time to the family waiting on the bus, Stan Sr. walked out of the bank to start across the street. He clasped his hands over his head and wagged them in the ‘victory’ sign.
Stan Jr. pointed the camera through a window of the bus and pushed the button that started the film to catch his father’s moment of triumph.
Note: Stan Sr. died in 1984, Loyola in 1997, T’Lane in 1986 and Harvard in 2012. When interviews were done for this story, Duke, a musician living in Florida, was traveling in Europe with former Elvis Presley sidemen.
