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Traveler
"Home is where you hang your hat." I remember hearing that
comment from my mother many times. Mom and dad were born and raised during the
teens, twenties and thirties in the same group of counties where their ancestors had lived
for over a hundred years. When they got out of high school and married, they
moved from the Ohio River valley about 100 miles from the Mississippi River to the
Atlantic coast in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City. Dad got a
job at the White Castle and then got a better paying job at Merck as a chemical operator
before World War II started. Since he was making medicine for the war effort, he was
exempted from military service.
On a Wednesday evening near the end of 1948, I was born in a hospital in a
small town in New Jersey near New York City. The regular doctor was not available,
so the attending physician was a female doctor who had recently come from Poland to escape
the political problems of the time. We lived in an old house on a street that was
only one block long in a neighborhood with mixed nationalities, races, and religions.
The first foreign language that I heard spoken was Ukrainian. The family
across the street had recently immigrated and, sometimes, I was left with them.
Fourteen years later, as fate would happen, I met a young airman at the Defense Language
Institute on the other coast who had lived in the same house in which I had lived.
Neither of us was studying Ukrainian.
During the summer before my fifth birthday, dad decided to move the family
back home and try to get a job at the new plant near Paducah. He did not get the job
and the family moved north to Joliet, a town just south of Chicago, Illinois.
Dad worked in an arsenal and made ammunition. He had sold the house in New Jersey
and bought a mobile home in a trailer park.
Shortly after my fifth birthday, dad got a job at the Portsmouth Gaseous
Diffusion Plant and the trailer and family were moved to southern Ohio after the end of
the school year. We lived in a trailer park in Portsmouth for a few months and then
dad bought a couple of acres in the valley of Camp Creek, a tributary of the Scioto
River on its the western side , and moved the family and trailer there. After living
in an urban environment for about five and a half years, Camp Creek seemed like one of
those places that time forgot. We lived in a trailer, so we had modern facilities.
Many of the houses along the valley and ridges had a pump in the yard and a wooden
building over a hole in the back yard. Some of the farmers used animals to pull
plows and other farm implements. We had a large garden each year and grew most of
our food. We took a glass gallon jug and went to a farmer's house at milking time to
get our milk. We lived about half a mile from the crossroads where the school and
general store were located. The store was also the post office. We lived about
four or five miles from the state highway, which ran along the river, and there were four
churches along the road. The footbridges that crossed the creek were swinging
bridges. Camp Creek was in the northern extension of Appalachia and some of
our neighbors were the Hatfields and McCoys who had left West Virginia to escape the
bloodshed of the feud. There was a Boy Scout troop at Camp Creek and although I was
only ten, I tagged along with them and cooked my first meal over a fire, took my first
hike, and went on my first campout there.
In 1958, Allied Chemical built a chemical plant associated with the
nuclear industry in southern Illinois, just across the river from Paducah, Kentucky.
Allied went to Portsmouth to recruit a few chemical operators who had experience
with nuclear materials and dad decided that this was his chance to get a little bit closer
to his aging parents. They guaranteed him five years and that is how long the job
lasted. In 1959, the trailer and land was sold and , after school was out, the
family moved to Paducah, Kentucky. Once again, I was in an urban environment, but it
was small town urban instead of megalopolis urban. We lived in a small house in a
subdivision. My mother's brother lived a couple of blocks away and I always had
cousins and friends around for company. The elementary school was only a block away.
I rode a bus to the junior high school (grades 7, 8, and 9). The high school
was about a mile away. Mom took me to school in the morning and I walked home after
school. I became a boy scout in 1960 and was a member of three different troops.
The first two were sponsored by churches and the last one was sponsored by the
junior chamber of commerce. The assistant chief of police was the scoutmaster.
Three of my summers were spent as a member of the camp staff at the new boy scout
camp on the shore of Kentucky Lake. The summer of 1964 was spent getting ready for
and attending the national jamboree at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. That trip
included a trip to the world's fair and other sightseeing trips in New York City.
During the spring of 1967, I traded my boy scout uniform for an army
uniform. I enlisted in a reserve unit and was sent to the Monterey Peninsula of
California for basic training and language training during the summer and fall of 1967 and
winter of 1968. I found that army bases have two types of sand......the type that is
left after a steam roller goes over it and the type that is left after a sub-soiler goes
through it. Both are used for physical training. After basic training, I spent
a lot of my off duty hours walking along the shore and walking through the old city.
A radio broadcast about a group of people being taken prisoner by a foreign
power not in southeast Asia filled the air on the bottom floor of B-6. A voice was
heard identifying a member of the group and then a hand pointing to the cubicle next to
mine and the voice saying that the person had lived there only a few months earlier.
A somber pause filled the air. A lot of young men grew up fast that day.
Monterey is dry in the summer and wet in the winter. Most of the moisture is
fog and drizzle. The predominate ground cover was what we called "ice
plant". It was a lot like aloe. The trees were mostly pine and oak trees
that were very small.
During the summer of 1968, I got another set of orders and another
airplane ticket. This time it was on the east coast and was for a month and a half
at a location between Washington and Baltimore. I was the only reservist in the
class. The other members of my class had orders for headquarters at a place called MACV, in
southeast Asia. After I had been there a week or two, I took an overnight side
trip to Ocean City, Maryland, on the bus. I rented a raft and floated on the water
all afternoon. I got "baked" in the sun and some parts of my skin
peeled three times. The rest of my weekends were spent exploring the Smithsonian and
other buildings of interest in the government buildings section of DC. I changed my travel
plans and took a side trip to the Chicago area on my way back home. The plane
left DC National and got about as far as Dayton before the pilot started talking about the
bad weather ahead. The plane circled Dayton and then landed at Fort Wayne. We
were given the choice of going the rest of the way on a bus or trying to fly the rest of
the way. I chose to fly and found myself in a plane that was sliding backwards
through the air. The pilot managed to save the plane and we spent several hours
flying around Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa before the plane could land in
Chicago.
In September, 1968, I entered Murray State University as a sophomore.
I lived in Murray five years......the first three on campus and the last two off
campus. ROTC was mandatory for freshmen and sophomores, but I was exempt for obvious
reasons. Murray is an old town between the east and west forks of the Clarks River,
a tributary of the Tennessee River. One of its main industries was the University.
It was a rather peaceful campus at a time when there were riots and demonstrations
on many other campuses throughout the country.
As a part of my degree program, I was required to go to a community
college and teach for one term. I was a member of the faculty of Shelby State
Community College in Memphis, Tennessee, during the winter quarter (January, February, and
March) of 1973. I was offered rooming privileges at one of the dormitories of
Memphis State University and I accepted the offer. At that time the community
college was located at the corner of Getwell and Park in the buildings of the old veterans
hospital. I spent the weekends that I did not have reserve meetings driving around
Memphis and learning the town. I taught one section of American Government and one
section of Physical Geography. All but two members of each class were African
Americans. The geography class was lecture and the government class was mostly
discussion of materials which I handed out. That included an article by article
discussion of the Constitution.
It was the late summer and early fall of 1973 on a beach in the panhandle
of Florida. A choice.....the "Lady Lex" or the lady that I married.
Indoc.....a one dollar haircut.....an EEG.....an EKG.....the doc at NAMI said "Go
Fly". Gunny heard the words DOR. The statement read "With malice
toward none". An officer and a gentleman I was not destined to be. I did
not make it to the moon, but the other lady and I celebrated our thirtieth wedding
anniversary in 2003.
After getting married in September, we moved north to the Chicago area in
October, 1973. I worked in an office furniture factory near Aurora, Illinois, on the
afternoon shift with some of the proud citizens of Mexico who had come north to work in
the factories. My high school Spanish kept me in good standing with my fellow
workers during the three years that I worked there. We rented an apartment on the
east side of the Fox river for a few months until we got established and then moved to the
west side of town. We did not have any children when we lived in Aurora and much of
our leisure time was spent sightseeing in Chicago and northern Illinois.
During the week before Thanksgiving, 1976, we moved back home to Paducah,
Kentucky. We bought a house in a subdivision and the family has lived there since
the first part of 1977. Paducah is best described as being located where the
Tennessee River flows into the Ohio River about forty miles from the Mississippi River.
Paducah is a medical, commercial, and business center for the region. It is
the predominate urban area between St. Louis, Memphis, Nashville, and Evansville.
Every spring, thousands of people come from all over the country and all over the world to
Paducah for the annual quilt show of the American Quilters Society.
From the summer of 1982 until the summer of 1983 I was an electrician on
the road. The union hall sent me to work at TVA's Paradise Steam Plant in Muhlenberg
County, Kentucky. Everything around the plant on the Green River was the man made
ridges of strip mining. The job was over one hundred miles from home, so I
lived in Greenville instead of driving to and from Paducah each day. During the
first few weeks, I lived in a cheap motel room which I rented by the week. After I
found out that the job would last for an extended period of time, I rented an apartment on
the top floor of an old apartment house. The apartment had three rooms and a
community bathroom was in the hall. When I was not at work, I was doing professional
level research on the topic "The Economic Geography of Electric Energy in the United
States". The walls of my apartment soon became decorated with power plant and
transmission line maps from all over the country.
In 1984, I put on my army uniform again. Then came another set of
orders and another airplane ticket. I spent the winter of 1985 in the desert of
southern Arizona near the border with Mexico. The ground was about 4000 feet above
sea level and the dry air was cold and thin. The main vegetation was cactus and
sagebrush. I heard a sound in the brush one day and thought it was a dog. It
turned out to be a very large rabbit.....a jackrabbit. After a few weeks I got used
to the lack of oxygen in the air and physical training became easier. When I
returned home, I found that I could run faster and longer than I could previously.
That lasted until my body once again got used to the air at an elevation only a few
hundred feet above sea level.
My training in Arizona required a language proficiency, so in 1986 I
returned to the language school in California again. I returned about eighteen years
after I had left the first time and studied the same language in the same classrooms with
some of the same teachers. In some respects it was like waking up in Sleepy Hollow
after sleeping for eighteen years. The school was much easier the second time
around. I was there for an entire twelve months this time. Other than Friday
night, half of Saturday, and half of Sunday, my time in Monterey was devoted to the
mission which had sent me there. I managed to keep my sanity by once again walking
along the shore and through the town. The greatest change between 1968 and 1986 was
Cannery Row (of John Steinbeck fame). In 1968 it was just a street full of unused
and run down buildings left over from a bygone era. In 1986, it had been transformed
into a tourist attraction with a hotel, restaurants, and souvenir shops. Part of the
Star Trek movie about the whale was filmed at the aquarium on Cannery Row while I was in
Monterey.
On the back of the tee shirt were the words "In God We Trust, All
Others We ******* ". On the front were the words "The ***** of Texas Are
Upon You". I stepped off of the plane in an airport in the western half of
Texas and spent the fall of 1987 and the winter of 1988 there. The land was flat for
miles around. A river ran through the town. When the wind blew, it seemed to
blow forever. My life there reminded me somewhat of George Orwell's 1984.
