As Communist dictator Joseph Stalin consolidated his power in Russia in 1931, a 20-year-old Sheridan woman accompanied by two young men from Germany made headlines across the country by driving from Berlin to Moscow.
Adolf Hitler was still a couple of years away from becoming Germany’s chancellor and Soviet Russian leader Vladimir Lenin had been in his Red Square tomb for seven years.
As they covered the 1,131 miles between the two cities in a week across unpaved Polish and Russian roads, Joan Platt became the first American woman many of the peasants in those countries would meet. And she experienced their hospitality as well as their hostility.
Platt’s father was working as a mining engineer there when she went from mentions in the Sheridan-area newspaper’s social pages to a New York Times feature story that was reprinted in newspapers across the nation.
“Girl Autoist’s Dash Amazes Russians,” read The New York Times headline on July 21, 1931. “Muddy Trails, Sleeping in Haystacks and Foraging for Food Offset by Soviet Hospitality.”
Platt, born Jan. 9, 1911, to Edwin and Helen Kilbourne Platt, told the Moscow-based reporter that it was “an unforgettable trip.”
Her father, an engineering graduate from the Colorado School of the Mines, was working under contract with the Amtorg Trading Corp., which in 1930 served as the world market purchaser for the USSR as well as its trade delegation.
She traded the two-tracks of Wyoming for something a little less definable.
“The roads, if they can be called that, often were worse than the roughest Wyoming trails, but I saw a side of the Russian people which I did not know existed,” she said. “I would like to repeat my trip, in spite of sleeping in haystacks and foraging for food.”
The German boys who accompanied her on the trip were both infatuated with the American and neither wanted the other to make the trip with the woman alone, Platt’s friend would tell a Sheridan news editor decades later.
Left, the Washington Evening Star on April 8, 1951, featured a photo of Joan Platt Towle to promote a benefit tour. Center, The Winston-Salem Journal printed a photo of Stanley and Joan Richardson for its Feb. 19, 1941, edition. They were guests at the Fort Sumter Hotel. Right, the Greenboro, North Carolina, News and Record on Nov. 7, 1947, announced that Stanley Richardson was taking a position with Voice of America. (Courtesy Newspapers.com; Courtesy Newspaper.com) 
Left, The Sheridan Press on Aug. 20, 1990, reported on Joan Platt Towle’s last trip home. Right, The New York Times on July 21, 1931, published a story about a Sheridan, Wyoming girl who drove from Berlin to Russia. (Courtesy Wyoming Newspapers.com; Courtesy New York Times)
Poles Dislike
During their trek across Poland, once the trio got past Warsaw, the American and German flags on their car caused issues with some rural Poles in a small village.
They didn’t like the German flag. The little company camped by the road with one of the male companions sleeping with a pistol, she said.
Platt reported that there was no road in a section of “no man’s land” to the Russian border, so they drove along the railroad tracks. The border itself was marked by barbed wire, and they were accompanied by a Polish officer.
On entering Russia, the customs officer took the group’s revolver.
Once in Russia, they found the little peasant villages had no hotels, so they slept in haystacks and ate mostly black bread, tea and potatoes during their stops among the people.
“They went to a neighborhood collective farm whose manager produced two pounds of butter, three dozen eggs and several packages of tea,” The New York Times reported. “The peasant was astounded by this munificence and stood open-mouthed while his guests scrambled a couple dozen eggs with a generous chunk of butter.
"He and the rest of the men in the hut ate with their guests but made the women folk serve and then stand back to the wall.”
The article noted that in Russia, “the sight of a young girl driving a car attracted a lot of attention.”
AP correspondent Stanley P. Richardson’s byline was not on The New York Times road trip article, but as a correspondent stationed in U.S.S.R.’s capital he became acquainted with Platt and convinced her to marry him on Jan. 26, 1932.
Richardson would go on to work for U.S. Ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies and later went back to journalism covering Nazi attacks on London and the D-Day Landing for NBC News.
Filling In For Hubby
The Sheridan Press on Aug. 6, 1933, wrote about the young wife in Moscow filling in for her husband on an assignment.
“Joan Platt Richardson, wife of Stanley Richardson, the Associated Press man, is noted as the most beautiful blonde in Moscow … and she is,” said Milly Bennett, who heads the copy desk in a newspaper office in Moscow. “When a couple of flyers cracked up outside of Moscow last year and hubby couldn’t leave his post, the gal grabs a camera and a train and gets her pictures and her story.”
When Joan Richardson’s parents returned to Sheridan from Russia in 1932 due to her father’s health, she and her husband continued living in Moscow for a time and apparently made connections with the city’s elite.
The couple attended a Moscow dinner honoring the first USSR ambassador to the United States on Dec. 15, 1933.
She also made the news when she shipped a blue-blooded furry gift to her parents.
A fox terrier pup named “Vodka,” whose sister was owned by a Madame Litvinov in Moscow, traced his ancestors to Britain’s “finest wire-haired terriers,” The Sheridan Press reported on Sept. 19, 1933.
However, the trip from Russia, to Berlin, for a clean bill of health to clinics in New York and Chicago for isolation before a Denver stop proved too much.
“Vodka, a tiny bit of Russian canine aristocracy who made a long journey across the ocean from Moscow to make his home with Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Platt here will never know his master,” the Sheridan reporter wrote. “Vodka died in a Denver hospital last week from a long siege of distemper which he contracted in July.”
In the mid-1930s the Richardsons were reassigned to Washington, D.C., where Stanley Richardson covered the State Department and sometimes the White House.
In 1938, he was offered a job as assistant to Davies who had remained Russian ambassador during Stalin’s enforced famine in the Ukraine and the dictator’s many purges of his perceived political enemies.
Davies was being reassigned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Belgium.
The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel reported in February 1938 about Stanley Richardson’s new job serving a U.S. ambassador. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Sheridan Press on Oct. 11, 1939, reported on Joan Richardson returning to Washington, D.C., as her husband returned from Europe. (Courtesy Wyomingnewspapers.com) 
The Sheridan Press reported on Sept. 19, 1933, about the sad story of a dog named Vodka. (Courtesy Newspapers.com)
Brussels Assignment
Stanley Richardson resigned his AP post to take the post with Davies. Joan Richardson determined to join him in Brussels.
First, she took her own pet named Whiskey and Soda, a fox terrier, with them since their wedding, to Sheridan.
Joan Richardson was also home in Sheridan long enough to offer her 36 Packard convertible coupe for sale, according to an April 14, 1938, want ad in the Sheridan paper.
She rejoined her husband in Washington after he briefly spent time in Moscow with Davies prior to the Belgium assignment. They set sail for Brussels in July 1938 as announced in a Washington Times column on July 8, 1938.
“The Stanley Richardsons … have finally gotten off to New York and subsequent sailing to Belgium,” Peter Carter reported in his column. “So glad were there many friends in this town to see these two that parties both welcoming and farewell were the order of the day, up and practically to the point of exhaustion.”
Joan Richardson happened to be back with her parents at their Sheridan ranch in June 1941 when her father died of gunshot to his abdomen.
“The body was found about 4:30 (p.m.) by Mrs. Platt, who with her daughter, Mrs. Stanley Richardson of Washington, D.C., were in the living room downstairs when they heard a noise like that of a door being slammed by a breeze. That noise was followed by a heavier sound as if someone had fallen,” the Sheridan Press reported on June 29, 1941.
Edwin Platt was found on the floor by Helen Platt and the paper reported he had been suffering from asthma and had not been in good health since returning from the Soviet Union in 1932.
Joan Richardson’s mom sold the ranch and moved to Washington, D.C., to be with her. When the war broke out, Stanley Richardson took the job with NBC in London, and Joan and her mother stayed in Washington, D.C.
The war years found Richardson occasionally mentioned on social pages in the city. But the separation with her husband apparently took a toll on their marriage. They divorced in 1946.
Stanley Richardson took a job with Voice of America. Joan Richardson became Joan Platt once again until a marriage to Col. Stewart Warren Towle Jr., a decorated World War II Army Air Corps pilot. A newspaper mentions her new name in 1951.
Journey Back Home
The girl who toured Russia in a car, likely got her traveling genes from her mother.
Helen Platt traveled the world in the 1960s and the Towles sometimes joined her before Helen Platt died in May 1968.Her ashes were brought back to Sheridan for burial.
Joan Platt Towle also returned home for good five years after her own death in March 1985. The colonel had kept her ashes in their home until he died.
Then Charles Towle, the colonel’s son, along with a special friend of Joan Platt Towle, returned her to Sheridan in August 1990.
“A pioneer in women’s aviation and a friend of Amelia Earhart’s landed in Sheridan last weekend to take an old friend on one last flight,” The Sheridan Press reported on Aug. 20, 1990. “Fay Gillis Wells came to Sheridan to spread the ashes of Joan Platt Towle Sunday over the ranch Towle grew up on near Story.”
Wells met Joan Platt in Russia when both of their dad’s worked as engineers. With Earhart, Wells cofounded the “99s” a group of women aviators. Wells had retained her friendship with Joan Platt over the years and had been at the wedding between Joan and the colonel.
During her visit to Sheridan, Wells reminded the paper’s managing editor it was Joan Platt Towle who 59 years earlier had traveled from Berlin to Russia as a 20-year-old.
“Joannie was adventuresome, always doing things like that,” she said.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
