1959

1959:
Changes again.  How rapidly and with so little thought we made them!  By this year we were back in Rantoul, Illinois (another transfer.)  Early in the year we had moved to a pleasant house in Iowa Park that we hated to leave.  I got my first drivers license in Iowa Park.  We bought a new 1959 Fiat that we drove to Illinois.  When we got there we lived in a basement apartment, then found a big old farmhouse in Loda, Illinois.  The kitchen was about 20 x 30 feet.  There was fresh milk, pleasant times, and poverty.  We played cards a lot, shared a lot with friends, and began dreaming about the time when we would “get out”—of the Air Force, that is—the target date was October, 1960.  By Christmas we had moved twice more—once to another big house, which we shared with another couple, and then to an apartment in Thomasboro.  The neighbor here was the sister of the person in the duplex where we lived when Richard was a baby, and it was “old home wick.”  The German community welcomed us for some reason, and we spent this Christmas at one of their houses.  Maybe that’s where I got my love of German food.  They were neat people.  Randy was on the way, and times were happy.