The Zerky Mobile

Letters to Zerky: a Father's Legacy to a Lost Son...and a Road Trip Around the World. The car was parked across the street from the library. Pages of letters written in 1967 are reproduced on the van, and they tell of a young family's exploits on the ultimate road trip with a charming one- year-old in tow (Xerxes--Zerky--the author's son). "All over the world people were enamored of Zerky, a little blond boy on a big adventure."

Bill Raney wrote the letters while they were traveling years ago, because he realized that his son was too young to be able to remember the details of the trip. At the end of their odyssey, the family settled in Santa Cruz in 1968, and opened the Nickolodeon, a popular movie theater. A few months later his wife passed away, and about a year after that young Zerky was run over by a truck on a neighborhood street. It wasn't til forty years later that Bill rediscovered the letters he had written to his son, along with his wife's travel journals and a stash of old photographs. He decided to put together a book to serve as a memorial to Zerky.