I have been feeling a new chapter coming for me, quite literally. So, I am here, interviewing my dad to record his stories and share them in little blog bursts. My titling of this blog, Current Memory, is directly related to my lack of remembering. My dad will tell you it is hereditary, and he is to blame, but I found he has a lot of the memories, and with continued prodding, he can tell me quite a bit about his life.
Our first excavation of memories came on a walk in the trails near my house. He with his pups and me with my mine. Our topics were mingled with him bagging dog poop and me assuring him mine pooped far enough off trail to not.
I started us with the fairly vague topic prompt of "What's the earliest memory you have?"
Dad could remember a few moments from about 4 or 5 years old. Kerry Koeping lived kitty-corner to him on his street in a San Diego neighborhood. They played marbles with the other neighbor kids and everyone had a jar of Mercury to play with. Without the extreme amount of safety regulations that are present for my children, my dad was a little guy just loving liquid metal. On that same street, he had a clear mental image of walking home from school on what he described as a stormy day, but with wind and not the wet stuff. "It must have been six blocks at least from school to my house. It was time to unload all of the Easter crap we had made, and I was having a lot of problems hanging on to it."
I knew my dad was raised in California, but the only piece of that knowledge I could hang on to was that he went to one of two Livermore high schools. He was born at San Diego Mercy Hospital and on a visit in more recent years saw that the hospital was still there. "I don't know if anyone was there with mom when I was born. I do remember my dad staying home when she had Glen."
He didn't have any memories of living his earliest years in Bakersfield. His father would retire from a 20+ career in the Navy while they lived there and start working his next years as a postman in San Diego. If I had been told this before in life, it was gone for me. I asked him if he was working at the post office, "No, no. He was delivering the mail directly to doorsteps, carting the mail on foot behind him". My grandfather was attending community college while slinging for USPS.
I would guess he didn't have to worry too much of the rain, snow, sleet, or hail in Southern California.
Dad had some of his father's college papers he shared with me. I haven't dug into them yet, but there's one on inflation and I'm anxious to see how well it dates to the extreme amount we are experiencing now. From what dad recalls, once he had finished at community college they made a move to Stockton where he would turn over his post and find himself another government position at the Social Security office. Dad went to Westburn School in Stockton for two years, before they moved to a rental in San Leandro for a year while he was in the 4th grade. It's after San Leandro that there is the move to Livermore that my memory had held onto.
He lived in the same house until he graduated high school. Photography is one of the many things my dad excels at. He makes himself a student of all things. I have not once heard him tell me he was bored. Dad asked his father to pay for a photography school and was shut down. Not wanting to continue going to school, he opted for the Air Force. I asked him if Grandpa was upset with his choice. "No. He was glad to see me getting out of the house. I asked him what he did when he wasn't on duty. 'Stand watch.' Watch for what? 'Watch for whatever you're supposed to be watching for.' I headed to the Air Force recruiter instead of the Navy one."
"Sometime after I was in Basic Training, my folks sold the house in Livermore and moved to Kingston." My dad left after high school for Basic Training at Lackland Airforce Base in Texas, and by that August, he was back home getting married to my mom. He had much shorter hair than he had left with. "I belong to a Lackland group online. Looks like the barracks I stayed in have been demolished, as well as the hospital. I spent 3 days in that hospital with blisters. It was the max you could stay without being held back and joining the group coming in behind us."
The Air Force recruiter had my dad sign up as a heavy equipment operator. This my grandfather had opinions on. "He put his foot down on the heavy equipment. He didn't think it would be a marketable skill later. It would have been more marketable than the airline mechanic position I was put in next. Once you're out, getting a job as an aircraft mechanic was going to come with a shit ton of schooling to get the required license." When his 4 year service time was coming to an end, he opted for a computer tech school instead. The school was $5,000. Even though the school was VA accredited, they didn't do something the way it needed to be done to get the funding. Dad found this old guy who was head of the office there at the base. He signed off all the necessary things so he could get 80% of the cost covered. "Pops paid the rest of it for me."
Dad's time was extended by the Air Force by four months so he could finish school. He was attending school on Friday nights from 5-10 pm and then again on Saturday and Sunday for an 8-hour day. It was on one of these Friday nights that my dad showed up to class and there was a note waiting for him. My mom had gone into labor 4 weeks early and she was at a Livermore hospital. "Nana wanted to cover the bill for her to stay in the civilian hospital until she was told how much it would be. Your mom was transported by ambulance to Oak Knoll Hospital on the Navy Base in Oakland." My brother, Jon, was born on a Saturday. May 1, 1982, made him our May Day baby. By July of '82 my parents were packing us all up to move to Washington.
In the long list of things I have likely been told and do not remember, I learned (again) that my grandfather spent his childhood years in Bremerton while my great-grandfather was stationed at PSNS. My dad had a family road trip that took him by the old house, but he couldn't recall much more than it being on 5th Street. The area has plenty of houses still there from the 30s; it would be a fun bit of information to know which one it is.
He's been able to piece together the first spot where his parents lived from an old letter he found and another home with a Spanish name above the doorway.
"I think my dad met my mom in Arizona. He must have been recruiting, there certainly aren't any Navy bases. My mom had driven across the country from North Carolina to Arizona with Aunt Minnie." Minnie was married to my grandma's brother, Earl ("Uncle Buck"). My dad had regrets about not tapping into the memories that Minnie had. It was ironclad with all of the details. Apparently, she knew where all the bodies were buried. "I can't remember what she was trying to tell me, but we were someplace that she couldn't finish talking about it. I can only remember she was eluding to a big secret." Maybe she had
buried the bodies herself.
My grandparents met through a mutual friend that my grandma had been staying with. Arizona became the wedding location for them. My grandparents were 12 years apart in age and I asked my dad if his father had been married before. "As far as I know, it was the only one. Not that he would have said otherwise if it hadn't been." It didn't sound like either of his parents did a lot of discussing on the family matters front. My dad was an adult before he learned his older brother, Ricky, had epilepsy. "Looking back, I think Mom was taking me with them to medical appointments when he was being diagnosed. I never saw any problems, except one. I went home for something, and Ricky was dragging his leg behind him, telling me he had forgotten his meds at home." That was it for any health issues my dad was exposed to growing up. He and his sister, Christine, had some visits to the Oak Knoll Navy Hospital for acne treatment. Not a bad part of life to be uneventful.
My grandma Betty worked all of my life up until the year that she passed away. She had retired shortly before her cancer diagnosis. For my dad's life, his mom didn't start working until they moved to Livermore. "Some duplexes were being built in front of the track where we lived. She talked to a builder and got Ricky a job digging trenches and laborer stuff. I remember him watching him dig the trench and he was going to town on it. The guy was 'Slow down! Slow down!'. My mom got a job cleaning the windows at the duplexes." My grandma got her real estate license sometime after that. She went to work for a small agency, Pearson Realty. She really enjoyed it. There were only a few of them in the office, and they were all good friends. "My dad used to talk about what a yacker Ralph Striker was. Ralph got pulled over once and kept the cop there for 20 minutes trying to sell him a house."
"Mr. Pearson had a son in my class. We were all super jealous of the new Camaro he got at 16. I thought he was so lucky. Around the time we graduated high school, his son died of cancer. Sad. He wasn't so lucky after all."
When she moved to Washington, she got her Broker's License and went to work for Spot Realty. I remember the binders around the house with the orange logo and going to the office when it was in the brick building at Lincoln and 305 in Poulsbo. "Mom was pretty disillusioned walking in there. The gal she partnered with was a backstabber. Mom wasn't used to any of that with the little office she had come from. She just got fed up with and quit." My life memories of her always have her at the grocery store in Kingston as a checker. She was a very loved lady and found her little spot of friends again.
Comments