The focus for these first trips led by Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Eleanor Hogan between 1935 and 1941 was labor and unionization, governments efforts on behalf of the people, and the use and abuse of natural resources.

The first two Long Trip in 1935 and 1936 took students to Morgantown, West Virginia and Washington, D. C. Stops included the mining area of Scotts Run, W.V. and the resettlement community of Arthurdale.

The major destinations for the Long Trips between 1937 and 1941 were coal and steel areas of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Salvatore Vascellaro's dissertation includes interviews with participants from the 1937-1941 Long Trips. He describes how Lucy Sprague Mitchell "divided the students into groups to shadow visiting nurses. The nurses' rounds frequently took the students 'way into the country' (Betty Clulow 1937). Marguerite Hurrey Wolf (1937 I) remembered how patients were so glad to see the nurse; she offered 'the only medical care in the community.' For Wolf and others, it was this experience of visiting the miners' families, more than any other, that 'struck home'" (p. 163).

"Rith Bigel (1938 I) describes the illegal mines: 'There would be an automobile near a deep hole in the ground. The automobile was held by big, big rocks in the back wheel. The pulley extended all the way down to the bottom of the coal mine...A man would sit on a bucket and the pulley would get him down there, he would fill the bucket, and then he would be pulled up.' To Bigel and the other students 'it was absolutely unbelievable,' 'how they were taking their lives into their own hands every time they went down there.' Bigel found this 'very admirable': 'They were desperate...[and] they took the reins of their lives into their own hands and did something about it.' Jean Todd Welch (1938) found that she 'could not understand how a man who wanted to feed his family would take such terrible risks'" (p. 167-168).

"Florence Krahn (1939 I) recalled that everyone there had known that miners worked under ground, yet experiencing the reality of it was 'a surprise,' and became 'something you really thought about' and wondered 'whether you'd like to do this or not.' By meeting the miners themselves, students moved beyond one-dimensional images of the oppressed worker. Elizabeth Helfman (1939 I) remembered the miners as friendly, 'appreciating [the students'] interest.' Florence Krahn...incorporated this understanding into the story she wrote for children, For Tens and Up, as a reflection of her experience of the trip. Esther Smith (1939) came to a similar conclusion when she visited a miner's family--which remained for the the most important experience of the trip...It was jarring for her to reconcile the 'hard life,' the 'grim' surroundings with those two boys playing so happily the entire time she was there. And she wondered 'why she [had] expected them not to be happy''' (p. 165-166).

"For Sarah Underhill Nafe (1940 Q) 'the actual steel factory floor overrode all other impressions': 'The vastness, the gray atmosphere and machinery, contrasted by the explosive vivid orange flames, hot orange cores of steel, the noise, the danger, all quite staggering.' Jean Ewing (1940 I) found the experience 'horrifying': 'I remember that the blast furnace was so terribly hot, it made an indelible impression.'...Sarah Underhill...realized these were problems the students 'could only guess' at: 'The world indeed had corners we had not experience before.' Like the students of the first Long Trip, many felt that their familiar ways of thinking 'got so shaken up,' that the complexity of what they had experienced left them with no neatly-tied package of ideas 'ready to be pigeon-holed'" (p. 170-172).

"Howard Rolfe (1941 Q) had been well aware of strikes from his interest in the labor movement. He recalled the students investigating the union strike of electrical workers. They had visited the strike headquarters, and on his own he roamed the picket line. What he had known intellectually became real when 'the tensions and hostility ' of the company were directed at him and the other students, 'who wanted to get the story from both sides.' This was the first time he witnessed a strike, and he described it as 'an experience'" (p. 169-170).