1960

1960:
The magic year came to pass, and during it we moved from the apartment in Thomasboro back into Rantoul into a little four room house ($40 per month).  Just before Randy was born Nancy and Richard had a bad case of chicken pox.  Just after he was born they had an equally bad case of measles.  Shortly after this time I began doing ironing for people, and took care of kids.  At one time Dad was scheduled to get a seven dollar per month cost-of-living raise, and it was so exciting we spent months planning the best use for it.  In the summer we moved into a rent house ($45 per month) we shared with a chinchilla ranch.  They had a room, and we had the other rooms.  Theirs was air conditioned, which gives you some idea of priorities.  At any rate it was a neat place, and I liked it.  IT was there that the box fan caught fire in the window and there that Randy ate a tube of zinc-oxide in his crib, my mothers hand crocheted heirloom bedspread was stolen by a family we befriended and it was there that I once blew the entire grocery budget for two weeks on cereal—I bought ever kind the commissary stocked.  The house was sold, and we moved to Dewey, Illinois to a beautiful place.  ($65 per month.)  We stayed there about two months—Dad had gotten past the 3rd of October and had his discharge—jobs were scarce, and having decided he wanted to be neither an Electrolux nor a Grolier Encyclopedia salesman, combined with the fact that fall is about a passing memory by November in Illinois, we came back to Texas.  Grandma and Grandpa lived in Elm Mott by then.  Richard, Randy, Nancy and I stayed with them for two weeks while Dad found a job in Dallas.  By Christmas we had moved in and out of an apartment in Dallas and had bought a house in Mesquite.  Life was okay there—the neighbors were all like us and had little kids, dogs, and all that.  By this time we had bought and sold a Pontiac, probably about a ’53, but whose exact birthday has slipped my mind, and a red Studebaker Station Wagon that was a the pride of our life.  Times got rough, and we let the pride of our life go, replacing it with a ’51 black Chevy.  however, I think that was a little later.  Christmas was nice.  Not much money, but at age 6 mon., 2, and 3, anything was great for the kids! It was in this house in Mesquite that we learned what central heat was. That was in the advertisement. What they meant was that the wall heater was in the hall, in the middle of the house. It was also here that Richard and Nancy decided to bake a cake. This was one of the few times I didn't get up early enough. We had no TV, so they had to do something to amuse themselves. This time I think they were really trying to do something good. They had the theory down okay, the eggs, flour, sugar and can't remember what else. They just hadn't learned the process, so eggs, sugar, flour, and whatever else were spread far and wide. I remember standing them in a line on a table to finish dressing them for church. We went to the Church of Christ in Mesquite, where Corky Boyd was the preacher, and Dr. Russell was a member. He later delivered Amy, and I was so grateful to him for making that much more comfortable than the others that I named Russell for him. Unfortunately he and his family were all killed in an airplane crash in Colorado. Sometimes money doesn't help--if he could not have afforded that plane, they might still be around.