I have moved so many times that I think I am a gypsy. Not counting the moves from home to college, and then back to home, while I was attending Washington College, I have moved 36 times. I will try to document those moves, and make some comments about them.
As you know, I was born in Visalia, Tullare County, California. When I was six months old, we moved to Oklahoma City. We lived first at some address on Park Place, of which I do not have any recollection. My brother Dale does have some memory of living there. I also do not know how long we lived there. (Subsequent to writing the above I have found a photo of Dale and I with Dad on the porch, and a note on the back that the address was 419 W. Park Place.) I also found another photo with Clyde, Dorothy, Dale and I, along with two other people, I cannot identify. The photo with Dad on the porch and Dale and I in front of the house, is shown in one of the other chapters.
My first memory is of our next house at 1510 NW 15th St.
(I did a google on this house, and it was built in 1925, and is valued today at $96k.) The cars in the driveway belong to the house on the right (actually a duplex).
Then in the 5th grade, Mother married Eugene Kile, and we moved from 1510 NW 15th St, to 1400 NW Park Place, which was only about 6 blocks from the house on 15th Street.
We lived there for one year before Eugene Kile took a job teaching Chemistry at the Hockaday School in Dallas, Texas.
As I mentioned before, Park Place was named instead of 11th Street, and the house faced a short street that dead ended into McKinley Park, so once again, we were within 2 blocks of the park.
We moved into a house at 5820 Belmont Ave, which was about 8 blocks walking distance to our elementary school. As Dallas Schools had half grades as did Oklahoma City, I was in the second half of the sixth grade.
As the year ended, Eugene Kile accepted a principalship at Tennant High School in Tennant, California. Mother had been working as a secretary in Dallas, but had to begin teaching again, as the Tennant High School only had two teachers – Eugene Kile and my mother.
I had to take the 7B classes in the summer school in Dallas, so that I could start in the 8th grade in Tennant Elementary School. Dale was in the 9th grade. Tennant was a logging community and very small. The high school had two classrooms and a chemistry laboratory, and was separated from the elementary school by a gymnasium (actually a fairly small basketball court). The elementary school had two classrooms. The 5th Grade through the 8th Grade were in one room and 1st to 4th in the other room. We had three students in our 8th Grade class. We had four rows of chairs, and each row was a complete grade, though as I recall, the 8th Grade was the smallest of the four classes. The other two students were Clarise and Charlie, and were not related.
The photo below shows the school, which was not much different when I attended. the left side of the photo is the 1st through 8th grades, and the center part was the gym with the high school on the right, but the low extension on the right was replicated on the other side, forming the high school.
I was the 8th grade Valedictorian and at graduation, and I recited the Gettysburg Address. It was at Tennant that I learned a lesson in gun safety. Charlie and I were in his home, seated in the breakfast room (a small room off his kitchen) cleaning his rifles. I had one across my lap and Charlie made some comment that caused me to respond by jumping up; as I did so, the rifle discharged, even though it was supposed to have been empty. Fortunately, the 22 caliber bullet went into the door frame, and we were able to patch it with a dowel and some paint, so that no one ever found out. Charlie’s parents ran the general store (the only store in town) and
were not at home when this happened.
I diverge a bit, as this was supposed to be about moves, but too easy to remember and make comments as I reminisce. The year prior to our move to Tennant, there had been a tremendous snow fall and drifts up to the eaves of the roofs. The year we were there, we barely had enough snow to use the sleds. However, it was cold enough to pour water on some of the steeper slopes and use the ice as a substitute. As there were some Mexican families working in the logging community, there were a few in our schools. I learned my first Spanish (I thought) – “kitty combate?” Which really was ‘quirre combate’ (do you want to fight?). I do not remember getting into any fights, but my brother did and even had an opponent pull a knife on him. Fortunately, no one got hurt, as the knife ended the fight.
Being a small community, high up in the mountains — around 5,000 feet— the scenery outside the town limits was delightful. Charlie and I made a rifle out of some spare parts he had, and then we went looking for bear. Fortunately, we never found one, as I don’t think the 22 caliber would have stopped any bear.
Deer Creek ran around the town. Upstream the water was clear as crystal. Downstream, after the bridge for the road leading out of town, where the town sewage was deposited, the water was not very nice. I learned to fly fish in that upstream part of the creek.
After a year, Eugene Kile got transferred to a principalship in Tulelake, CA, which was a town of about 1,000 plus population, so this high school was quite a bit larger. They even had football, basketball, and baseball teams, and even some track events. I do not think there were any sport teams for the females however.
Before we moved, we had been promised a new apartment, but it was not finished by the time we arrived. So, we found a two bedroom apartment, that had no heat and no kitchen. Fortunately, it did have running water. It may have had some heat, but as we were only sleeping there, it never got turned on.
The high school had a home economics class, and so we got up early and went to school and had breakfast in the HomeEc classroom. Lunch was at school, and we ate dinner out. I do not remember how long it was before we moved into the new apartment, but I would say it was about four weeks.
At Christmastime, Mother left for Oklahoma City to have a hysterectomy. Unexpectedly, she decided to divorce Eugene Kile while she was home and did not return to California. Meanwhile, Dale and I remained in California with Eugene, while we waited to move back to our mother during our next school break at Easter. We were already doing most of the household duties, but then also took on the cooking. I don’t recall much about that time except that we seemed to have an awkward truce, where we kept our distance from our step-father until we could return home.
Once Easter break arrived, Dale and I took a long bus ride from Tulelake to Oklahoma City, where we returned to live at 1510 NW 15th. I was in the middle of 9th grade and so went to Roosevelt Junior High School, which was about one mile walk from home. Interestingly, weused the same math book, but the class was on the last third of the book, and at Tulelake, we had not finished the first third. Of course, the class at Tulelake was taught by the football coach, who was not a math teacher.
I remember getting into an argument about a long division problem, where the answer in the back of the book was wrong. The coach would not hear the argument, and believed the book was correct, so I was told to sit down and shut up. When we got to Oklahoma City, Dale had to teach me how to find the least common denominator. It is a wonder that I became a Math Major in college.
In 1948, when I would have been a rising senior at Classen High School, Dale had graduatedand was going to MIT on a partial scholarship. Mother married Ted (Theodore Boreham) Brooks that summer and left for Pennsylvania. I was told I could stay in Oklahoma City, as long as I had a job and could pay my rent to Mama (my grandmother as you remember). Well I had one job, but it was only a temporary one, so in late July, I moved to 202 Windermere Ave, in Wayne, PA. As the photo shows, the house was a mansion, in my limited view of homes. Ted had bought the house in 1941. It sat on a corner and was only one block away from the
high school.
Fortunately, Ted Brooks was an excellent stepfather. He was a general contractor, and let me help while waiting for school to begin. Actually, I went out for football and practice started in mid-August, so I did not work long for Ted at that time. I did work for him during one of the summers while in college, and he was instrumental in getting me summer jobs while incollege.
One of those jobs that he found for me was in South Carolina at the Savannah River Project. I lived in dormitory style building for the construction workers. We ate our meals in their cafeteria, and I had a shared room with one of the other workers.
One summer, I found a job at the Bethlehem Steel Works in Baltimore. I shared a room with another Washington College student. Unfortunately, the union went on strike later that summer, and as we were not union members, we lost our job. However, Ted found me a job at a lumber yard in Berwyn, PA, where I was a ‘gofer’, but mostly helped load contractor’s trucks with the material they had purchased. When I returned to Washington College that fall, I had a great tan and had risen to 165 pounds, but it was all muscle.
Another summer, I had a job delivering leased cars. The owner of the leased cars was a Washington College graduate, and was happy to have a student work with him. I took two cars to Phoenix and delivered them, and then stopped by Waggoner, OK, to visit with my childhood neighbor, Richard Jones.
While with him, I found a job with Oil Well Drilling Company, but the arrangement was strange. I found a room in a rooming house, that had a phone by my bed because I supposed to always be on call. During the day, I would go to the office, and if something came up we went out to the site and did what was needed. I don’t remember, but one time when this happened. Usually these problems happened during the night, however, I never heard the phone ring.Even thought it was a bedside phone, it did not wake me. It seems that I am a very deep sleeper. After this happened a couple of times, the company decided that I could do better
elsewhere, and let me go.
Ted found me a job with the DiRico Plumbing company. John DiRico was a buddy of mine in high school, and his father was the plumber. So the rest of that summer I worked in Wayne as a plumber’s assistant.
After graduating from college, I applied for a Master’s Degree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, VA. I had received a financial award as a graduation citation, and used that money to pay for the tuition at VPI. The plan was to take two courses in the Summer and then go to Las Cruces. NM, to work at the Proving Grounds there. I planned to take night courses at New Mexico State University for a year and then return to Blacksburg to complete VPI’s Masters courses. In Las Cruces, we again lived in a barrack-style building and shared a room with another of the workers.
An interesting event occurred while living in those barracks. The women’s barracks were adjacent to the men’s. Every night (at least it seemed that way), a woman came into her room and began to disrobe. She would get down to bra and panties and then turn her back on the window, and remove her bra. Then she would turn out the lights, and you could hear the groans coming from the men’s barracks.
However, when it came time to enroll in the night classes, I decided that I wanted to learn to fly and would rather join the Navy, so I quit and returned to Wayne, PA. I took the Navy’s physical, and flunked as I had a hearing problem. Actually, I just had a cold, when I took the physical. So, I went to the Air Force. i passed their physical, but they wanted to make me a Navigator. Because I really wanted to fly, I went back to the Navy and this time passed the physical.
While waiting for a slot in the Pensacola’s Pre-Flight Training, I found a job driving taxicabs in Philadelphia. One thing I learned from the taxicab days, was to always put your foot above the brake, when coming to an intersection,. That split second timing kept me from having several collisions in Philadelphia, while I drove for two months.
In November, I went to Pensacola, and joined the US Navy. After 3 months in Pre-Flight, we were sent to Milton, FL, for basic training in the SNJ, which was a two seater aircraft.
Of course, in the Navy we lived in barracks of which I cannot recall anything, other than having to make our beds in the military way. After basic training, we moved to Barin Field in Alabama for carrier-based flight training, and for gunnery training as well. The gunnery was interesting; we flew in formation and the instructor would tow a target. We had to peel off and fire at the target, and if the lead pilot in the formation was off in his timing, then the rest of the formation was also off. It became quite a contest to not get into the lead position.
One interesting item during this time, was carrier landings. We had to make six successful landings on the carrier, in order to qualify as carrier-based. Of course, we did many field practice landings, and I always enjoyed this activity, because it was low and slow, and considered dangerous. After thefield practices, we were given the go ahead for the actual carrier landings. We took off from Barin Field and headed toward the carrier out in the Gulf. At the carrier there are two areas: One is the delta pattern, where planes wait their turn to enter the landing pattern. The usual turn of events is that once you leave the delta pattern and enter the landing pattern, you make your six landings and then return to the delta pattern and then return to Barin Field.
I had made five successful landings and was waiting on the deck for clearance to take off, as the deck was fouled from the previous plane. Naturally, one looks around while waiting, and I saw a couple of my buddies on the control tower. Having one hand on the throttle and the other on the control stick, I acknowledged their thumbs up by sticking out my tongue at them. Then, I got the go ahead to take off, and continued on in the landing pattern. As my time to land came around, the deck was fouled and I had to be waved off. Before I could come around for my sixth and final landing, I was ordered to go up to the Delta pattern. I was really
surprised when the order came for everyone in the Delta pattern to then return to base.
When I returned and landed, and had parked the plane, I was told that I was to go directly to the Base Commander’s Office. When I got there, the CO chewed me out and gave me a down(failed me) for the flight. It seems that not only my friends had seen me stick out my tongue. The carrier skipper had also seen me, and was not happy with my skylarking.
So, I was delayed for about two months, before I could get back to carrier landings. Forseveral weeks, I had to go out and make field carrier landings, before returning to the actual carrier landings. And, as they required at least two landings for a trip to the carrier, I had to go out and make two more landings on the carrier. During this time the flight instructors for the field carrier landing practices would not even bother to give me directions with their flags, since they knew I was more than competent at this. I even tried to go high, and low, and slow, but they just stood with their flags at ‘ok’. They had quite a laugh every time I showed up for the
field carrier landing practices.
Once this was accomplished, we had to go to advanced training and we had a choice to make about which type of advance training we desired. I had fallen in love with the P6M, which was a four jet engine, high-wing seaplane. Therefore, I opted for seaplane advanced training, and headed for Corpus Christi, Texas. This was strange for me and for some of my close friends at Barin, as I really enjoyed the gunnery, carrier-based activities, and flying formation. Turns out this was a bad decision, since about halfway through seaplane training, the P6M had their third crash. It was decided to cancel the program, as the controls could not be stabilized. Down went my dreams of flying the P6M. The PBM which we trained on in Corpus Christi was not very exciting. We flew at 90 knots, climbed at 90 knots and descended at 90 knots. But we did learn about navigating, and star-spotting.
At Corpus Christi, I lived in the BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters), having gotten commission retroactively while at Barin Field, since I was a college graduate —they had changed the law to allow Pre-flight training to be equivalent to OCS. I roomed with Peter K. Irwin (“PK”), with whom I had played basketball in Pensacola. And it turned out the PK would be my best man at my wedding which took place on June 16, 1956, in Marshall, Texas, to a girl I had met while
stationed at Barin Field. We met at a USO dance in Mobile. She lived up to the rules of the USO, and refused to give me her phone number. However, later that year, the girl she was with at the dance showed up with a friend of mine at the Officer’s Club in Pensacola. She willingly gave me Barbara’s phone number.
So after we were married, we moved into the Married Officers Quarters in Corpus Christi. Just before getting our wings, a request came through for one pilot to join the Lighter than Air Training in Glynco, GA. Dick Stuebben and I said that we would go there, if they would take both of us. Well, they said come on! So off we went to Glynco, GA.
Unfortunately, Dick and I were in the first Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) Training Class to not have participated in the free ballon flight, which sounded like a lot of fun, as you ended up the swamp in Southern Georgia. This made the LTA Training shorter than it once was, so after three months of training, we were assigned to an Anti-Submarine Squadron in Elizabeth City, NC. Mike, our eldest son, was born in Elizabeth City.
We rented a 2-bedroom house at 1100 Wareham St., which had a fireplace. This was very useful before our furniture arrived, as it was fairly cold in December. We were only there for 9 months, before orders came down to close the base. Apparently, the new atomic submarines could outrun the blimps, so this base was no longer needed.
Dick Stuebben made the decision to return to seaplanes, but I stayed with the blimps and was assigned duty in Lakehurst, NJ. We bought a house at 1464 Tanglewood Lane, Lakewood, NJ, where our second son, Chris, was born. During his birth, a spring snowstorm occurred with three feet of snow, and I was in
Hawaii at the All-Navy Basketball Tournament. This trip was not expected. I was coaching the Lakehurst Basketball team, and we did not even have a college player on our squad. We won the 4th Naval District Championship, however, and went to RI to play in the North Atlantic Championship. Had we expected to win, I would have made arrangements for a substitute coach to go to Hawaii. We did win, and without prior planning, I ended up in Hawaii, where we
played against teams that were almost completely comprised of former college players. As might be expected, we did not win any games.
In August of 1958, I applied for an early release from my four year commitment, so that I could enter graduate school in September. It was granted, so we headed for VPI, in Blacksburg, VA. It was there that our third son, David, was born at the Radford hospital, which was about a 30 minute drive from Blacksburg. However, as the snow was very deep that year, it took a little longer to get there, even though the snow plows had cleared the roads; they were still a bit treacherous. When we got to the hospital, Barbara did not have enough time to get prepped, and barely made it to the delivery room before David was born.
This is the backyard of the apartment building where we lived. Barbara is still angry with me for teaching Mike how to climb the chain link fence. And he taught others to do the same, so the fenced in playground was no longer useful for babysitting.
We were in Blacksburg for two years, but during the first summer, I attended NC StateUniversity to take a statistics course that I had missed taking when I was in New Mexico. I lived in a dormitory while at NCSU, but was able to return to Blacksburg each weekend.
One interesting aspect of that summer resulting putting a seat belt in our car. The car was a 1954 Chevrolet, two-door sedan. While driving back to Blacksburg one Friday evening, I was in a hurry and the roads were winding through the mountains (this was before the interstate highway system was built). I hit one of the curves going a bit too fast. I ended up steering from the passenger side of the seat. One seat belt was put in the following week.
On obtaining my MS in Statistics from VPI, I had two job offers. One with Merrill Lynch in New York City, and the other from Du Pont in Wilmington, DE. DuPont offered more money, and living costs were certainly less in DE than in NY, so I went to work with DuPont. Not that our three boys had anything to do with that decision.
We rented a house in the Harmony Hills subdivision at 201 Hull Ave. The job office was in Newark, DE, at the DuPont Engineering Department Headquarters, which was only about three miles from the house in Harmony Hills. The job with DuPont was with their Service Division, which was a training ground for potential manager’s assignment. Each person spent two years at one of the DuPont locations and then moved again. This was supposed to go on for about 10 years, before being assigned to one of the industrial divisions.
My first assignment was in November in Waynesboro, VA with the Textile Fibers Department. In spite of the probability that we would only be in Waynesboro for two years, and against DuPont’s advice to not buy a house, but based on our experience with our first house purchase in Lakewood, we purchased a house at 812 Washington Ave. This home was only one block from the plant; in fact, the house’s back yard abutted the fence surrounding the plant.
Little did we know at the time, that our stay in Waynesboro would only be nine months. I was still in the Navy Air Reserve, and flying S2Fs out of Norfolk, VA one weekend a month. When the Berlin Air Lift arose, I was recalled to active duty. We sold our house in Waynesboro, and ended up paying a very reasonable rent for the nine months. This confirmed the wisdom in our decision to buy.
We rented a house in Norfolk at 5505 Berry Hill Road. After we moved in, the decision was made for our squadron to go to Cuba for at least six weeks.
Barbara and kids (three young boys and pregnant with our 4th child) decided to visit with her mother in Texas for the time I would be in Guatanamo Bay. While in Cuba, our squadron wast asked with taking photographs of Russian vessels with long cylinders on the decks, coming into Cuba. This is part of what precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. We stayed in Norfolk for almost a year, and were released from active duty. While here, our daughter, Susan, was born.
We returned to working for DuPont and bought a house at 2645 Drayton Drive, in New Castle County.
Mike’s English teacher lived next door to us in the house to the right in the picture. Bill and Bobbie Carmine also lived next door to us again a few years later, but at different location, not far away on Bexley Court.
It was about four miles to the Engineering Department office building. Then, after about two years, we were transferred to the Textile Fibers Department’s Nylon plant in Martinsville, VA.
There were not many options to purchase a house that we liked, so we rented a house at 310 E. Brown St, which was very close to downtown, making everything
very convenient. Our landlady lived in the brick house shown in the photo. She was a Hooker of the Hooker Furniture Company, and thought that we were plebeians. We were in Martinsville from 1964 to 1968, when I was asked to return to the Engineering Department and manage a group of computer programmers and so, returned to Delaware.
We purchased a house at 2802 Bexley Court. It was only about two blocks away from our house on Drayton Drive. As we always came in from a different direction,
we were unaware that we were so close, until after we moved in. After we arrived, our neighbors on the right of us at the Drayton Drive location, sold their house and the Carmines moved in next to us once again. Many times from this house, I rode my bicycle to work. It was a bit hilly, but I enjoyed the ride. Our neighbors
thought there was a crazy person riding a bike in a business suit early in the mornings. Onetime, a co-worker was following me home after work, and clocked me going 50 MPH, but that was downhill. We were both surprised I that I was going so fast.
In 1976, I was asked to transfer to the Petro-Chemicals Department for an assignment in France. So, in February 1976, I moved to Francheville Le Haut, a suburb of Lyon, France. It was a little chalet of 4 rooms and a bath. One room held the kitchen and dining area, and one room was just large enough to fit a twin bed in it. An aerial view, adjacent, shows it as it exists today, but the original chalet is no longer there. Our landlady lived across the street. The day I moved in, she brought over a bowl of ‘potage’. Subsequently, she took Barbara by the hand and introduced her to every store owner in the small village. Even Southerners could not beat her amazing hospitality.
At Easter time, the rest of the family moved in. However, Chris wanted to stay with friends until he graduated from high school, and Mike was already in college. As David and Susan were too old to go to the French Public Schools, they enrolled in College du Leman in Geneva.
The design of the plant was being done in Lyon, but the plant was to be built in Chalampe, which was a suburb of Mulhouse. In August, when the construction of the plant was underway, we moved to Mulhouse. As rental houses were at a premium, our team of 12 people drew straws for the houses that more than one person was interested in renting. We were fortunate to draw the right straw for the house we were able to rent. A three story house, where looking out the back windows, you could see all the way to Germany.
This is a side view of the house, with gate leading to the garage, which was underneath the house. Going down the hill on this side of the house, we walked the two blocks to the Catholic Church, where we met many of our neighbors. The Ziers lived diagonally across the intersection. Gerard was a member of our team and a liaison to the French DuPont organization. Looking to the left was the view all the way across the Rhine into Germany.
This is the front view of the house, and the wall surrounding the property. One had to ring the house from the street so that the gate could be opened electronically. Walls around houses are very common in France.
On completion of our time in Mulhouse, I came home with the family and we bought ahouse in Mechanicsburg, PA. Then I returned to London, living in a DuPont apartment in the Mayfair division in Downtown London. I stayed there for three months, while doing a study with other DuPonters from several European Countries.
We lived at 6311 Stephens Crossing from 1978 until 1986, when our research group with DuPont’s Berg Division moved to the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
We searched first in Raleigh, and then Chapel Hill, but could not find anything we liked, so we bit the bullet and looked in Durham. At the time, Durham did not have a very good reputation. However, we found exactly what we wanted at 207 Watts Street; it was a brick four bedroom, had a separate dining room, and was within walking distance of our Catholic church, Immaculate Conception.
As I write this, we have now lived here for almost 33 years. When we moved here, we had been married 30 years and it was our 15th move. And, we have no plans to move again (unless we can no longer go up and down the stairs).