1956

1956:
Ah, what a change a year brings! An August wedding, enlistment in the Air Force for Dad, a move to Illinois, and the news that a baby was on the way. This Christmas was spent in a four-room upstairs apartment we shared with another Air Force couple. The rent was out of sight for us--$110 per month, bills paid, and within walking distance of Chanute Air Force Base. My brother Ed and his wife came by to visit during the holidays on their way home from St. Louis to Duluth, Minnesota. They brought their six-week old baby, Paul, with them. This year was happy. We were young, in love, and the future was either bright or our rose colored glasses let us see it that way. The first car we had, a ’46 Plymouth (purchase price $60) was long since gone. We had no car at all.

Someone suggested that maybe there was a little more to the story than the paragraph above would seem to provide. Maybe there was. We moved to Big Spring, Texas, right after the wedding on August 18. I do mean right after the wedding, like that afternoon after the reception, which was held in the living room of the dormitory--those places that now are referred to as residence halls--where I lived. Maybe that was the last day to move out, but I don't remember. It was more likely that we were just anxious to get on with being married. Dave/Dad/Poppy had gone to Big Spring the week before to get a job and a place to live, while I finished summer school. I had walked at the spring graduation, but I still had summer classes to finish. School was supposed to finish on Saturday, but because of our wedding Mr. Pitts, the principal (he is the man in the wedding pictures that no one in the family recognizes) was kind enough to "give me away" as the phrase went back then, dismissed school so the wedding could happen. Seems strange to me now, but that is the best of my memory. My aunt Bertha was the only family member there on my side; I will be charitable for once and say the reason for that had to do with distance. Everyone else lived very far away. Bertha lived very far away as well, but Bertha loved to travel. What better reason for driving from Wichita, Kansas, to Abilene, Texas than the wedding of a niece, especially one that she had taken care of a great deal--even if it meant driving in an unairconditioned car many miles in Texas in August.

So when the wedding and the reception were finished, we got in our ten-year old green 1946 Plymouth and drove the sixty or so miles to Big Spring, to our new home. Sometime when it is not 11:35 p.m. after a long day of book carrying and house repair, family visits and grocery shopping, I will tell you about that new home.

Later . . .
Not such a long day, but one of those 100 degree August Texas days. Unlike Russell and Alice Ann, who live in "It's a dry heat" Arizona, it is hot. Sort of wilts your innards. Anyway, the first home was unique. It was on the second floor of an old ramshackle frame building, sort of like an Army barracks. We had two "furnished" rooms, a bedroom/living room/whatever else combination, and a kitchen. The bathrooms (men's and women's) were down the hall. At this point in my life it is difficult to imagine how I handled that, but we were in love, and no sacrifice seemed too great. The bedroom had a bed and a couple of chairs, as I recall, and opened to the hall. The kitchen was charmingly "furnished" with a stove, refrigerator, sink, table, and a couple of chairs. The cabinet was a second, non-operative refrigerator, one of those old, old ones. Maybe this was where I began to understand that items could be used for purposes other than the original design would indicate. I do not remember any roaches there, and had they been, it would have been my first--but alas, not the last--experience in living with them. The laundry was done by taking baskets down the stairs and a couple of blocks to the laundromat. This was not your sleek big washer variety, but an old tin building that housed maybe twenty wringer washers. After completing the long process to wash in those, the wet clothes (no dryers, as I recall) could be hung on clotheslines or taken back home (a basket of wet laundry is heavy) and hung in the apartment. Although I washed on a wringer washer many times after that and actually liked the things, that was an experience sufficient to last my entire lifetime.